“It is a characteristic of military problems that they yield to nothing but harsh reality; things must be reduced to elemental simplicity and answers must be clear, almost obvious.”
—- Dwight Eisenhower, “Crusade in Europe”
The future President, writing these words in his 1948 war memoir, was referring to the predicament in which the U.S. found itself in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Chaos and uncertainty were rampant; it was the responsibility of war planners, headed by President Roosevelt, to sort through the complexities and determine what to do. In the event, the planners decided, somewhat controversially, to make Hitler’s Germany, and not Japan, the Allies’ prime target. This is an example of what Eisenhower meant by a “clear, almost obvious answer” to the question, What now?
The Allies--Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union--could have spent precious months arguing about procedure; their bureaucracies might have commissioned study after study, hearing after hearing, even as the media and public opinion weighed in with all their cacophony and pressure. But the war still had to be fought now.
Oakland finds itself very much in the situation America was in post-Pearl Harbor. We, too, are at war. That might seem like hyperbole, but if you ask the average citizen--overwhelmed with Oakland’s murder rate and out of control criminality, shocked by the garbage and filth, startled by the encampments, appalled by crumbling infrastructure, alarmed by the collapse of downtown, outraged by a City Council caught in the throes of ideological madness—the war metaphor is apt. Every day, here at the Coalition we hear from helpless Oaklanders aghast at government’s driftlessness and blindness. Our friends beg us to find solutions. And here is where Eisenhower’s advice is so prescient.
If it were left to the City Council, they would simply kick the can further down the road by creating yet more meaningless job titles and commissions, holding yet more hearings and community meetings, conducting more studies, releasing more propaganda, demanding more “investment in the community,” and littering the road to progress by imposing ever more impedimenta to block the way forward. This is why nothing ever changes in Oakland, except for the worse: we have a City Council that truly doesn’t want anything to change!
Why not? My opinion is that the most leftward elements of the Council—by which I mean Kaplan, Fife, Bas and Thao—actually want Oakland to remain paralyzed, poor and decrepit. They themselves admit that their goal is to keep rents and home prices as low as possible. If you think about it, the best way to keep the cost of housing at rock bottom is to make Oakland ugly, dangerous and unlivable. People will not want to move here; in fact, they’ll want to leave. Corporations will not want to come here; in fact, businesses will leave. Since the cost of housing is purely a function of supply and demand, if you can drive demand into the gutter, then prices will also fall. Poor people will indeed be able to afford to live here. But at what price? The demolition of a once-great city.
Let there be no mistake: this is the true motive of our local radicals. They want an impoverished, broken city in the heart of a prosperous Bay Area. What Fife and her crowd are essentially saying is, “The only way for poor people to remain in Oakland is to drag the entire city down into decrepitude. We need the opposite of gentrification. We need slumification.”
Well, that is a declaration of war upon those of us who love and believe in Oakland. That is the harsh reality. And we’re entitled to fight back. Keeping in mind Eisenhower’s admonition, we need to keep things simple: identify the culprits—Fife, Kaplan, Bas and Thao. Okay, let’s throw Gallo and Kalb in there too. Call them out as the danger they are. Put them on the defensive. (Already, Fife is having to assure people that she doesn’t really hate the cops, lol. It just sounds that way from everything she says.) These people have no rational policy, just a grab-bag of resentments and race-baiting rhetoric. We have to attack and call them out, all the way to the November elections. We can start by getting rid of Bas, who—every time she’s at the side of Fife—looks increasingly pathetic, like a poodle in a tiger cage, who can only hope the beasts don’t devour her when they tire of her. Which they will, because the lifespan of useful idiots is short.
Steve Heimoff