Two things that happened on July 4 make me wonder if Oakland is already so lost that it can never recover.
First, I got myself some nice to-go food from Whole Foods and was sitting on one of the benches outside the store, eating and enjoying the warm afternoon sun and street scene, when an obviously deranged, probably stoned guy wandered over. He was ranting crazily and was disheveled, with his tattered pants lowered to his knees so that his underwear showed. I hoped he wouldn’t come over to me.
They have a lot of security guards at Whole Foods these days, and within a minute one of them arrived. He offered the homeless guy a cigarette, but otherwise didn’t interfere. The ranter wasn’t threatening me, but with these mentally ill people, you never know. Anything can set them off—and I’d just been mugged two weeks previously across the street by a similarly deranged homeless person. So I quickly finished my food and left.
I went over to the security guard and asked him what his instructions from management were concerning such situations. Obviously, the presence of such disturbed people is bothersome to most of us and can feel menacing. Was he, the guard, empowered to ask such individuals to leave the area?
Well, yes, the guard told me, but in general the only thing he does is to prevent them from entering the store. Other than that, they’re free to wander around the store’s perimeter, scaring and annoying diners and shoppers. When I looked surprised, he replied, “Hey, that’s just Oakland.”
Yes, it is…unfortunately.
The second incident happened that night. From about 2 a.m. to 3 a.m., in front of my building, not thirty feet from my bedroom windows, a group of young people was setting off fireworks, mostly rockets that made incredibly loud explosions as they soared about 100 feet into the air, then erupted into beautiful cascades of colorful sparks. (I was actually concerned about my building catching fire.) They did this in the middle of the street, forcing the cars that were trying to get through the intersection to stop and figure out how to continue—which was difficult, as the young people refused to move. They detonated box after box of rockets. As I watched them through my window, I realized that dozens if not hundreds of other people in my neighborhood must also have been awakened. And I wondered why we didn’t all gather in the street, surround the fireworks gang, and tell them to leave now.
But no one came. Probably they were watching through their own windows, pissed and angry, but too scared to do anything about it. Meanwhile, all through this hour of truly atrocious behavior, not a cop in sight. And that, too, is Oakland.
Whom are we to blame for the dysfunction into which Oakland has descended? It’s the fault of the bad actors, obviously, but ourselves as well. We don’t have to tolerate this kind of behavior. We could insist that it end, and we could take the necessary steps to compel it to end. But we don’t. Instead, through fear, or laziness, or misguided liberalism, or simple inertia, we allow the worst of our fellow citizens to act out their bizarre fantasies and sociopathic behavior, and then we tell ourselves, “It’s just Oakland.”
That is how societies end. When the decent, law-abiding majority decides it’s too much of a hassle to confront the lawbreakers, then the law itself becomes a joke. Criminals realize that their actions will have no consequences, and they practically dare us to try to stop them. Frankly, I can hardly blame them. They know that nothing they’ve done in the past has resulted in anyone challenging them, or is likely to. So, like children testing their parents’ limits, they misbehave again and again, each time going a little bit further over the line. And thus behold Oakland, a city of emboldened thugs and idiots, where every day the social fabric frays more, and from which more businesses and decent citizens flee.
We have to move beyond this “It’s just Oakland” meme, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not normal for such things to occur so regularly, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. Every society in history has figured out ways to control their misfits, but not Oakland.
I guess I’m asking for a modernized form of vigilante justice. Back in the old days, when formal “justice” was not to be had—as it is not in Oakland--vigilante justice preserved the peace. It worked then, and it can work now, if we can muster the courage. Whenever we witness individuals or small groups indulging in patently objectionable, illegal behavior, we—the good people—might catch each others’ eyes, make a silent understanding, and band together to reclaim our streets.
Steve Heimoff