“If anything of our civilization is remembered a thousand years from now, there is a good bet it will be the chorus of ‘She Loves You’ and an image of four men crossing a street in single file.’”
That’s from “John & Paul: A Love Story in Song,” an analysis of The Beatles by the British author, Ian Leslie. We can’t really know with any precision what anyone will recall of our time a thousand years from now—in the year 3026—but it’s fun to guess, and as for The Beatles, why wouldn’t it be them? Let us at least hope it won’t be Donald Trump.
If we go back a thousand years we find ourselves in the period known as the Dark Ages, when literacy in Europe was confined to the nobility. If you ask just about anybody today to tell you one thing about the year 1026, it’s likely you’ll draw blanks. A few people might mention the Crusades. But then, nobody was recording history a thousand years ago. By contrast, everybody is recording history now, with at least 120 million Americans owning an iPhone.
So what will people think of Oakland, circa 2026? I contend that the memory of our city will be of a once-thriving American metropolis that died due to the shortsightedness and incompetence of its leaders.
One of the more popular games historians play is analyzing why certain civilizations suffer the fate of extinction. Why did the Roman Empire die? Whatever happened to the Mayans? The Akkadians? The Visigoths? Historians cite many reasons for the decline of a civilization: economical, environmental, demographic, social, cultural. What seems likely is that Oakland will not survive its current crisis, and if anyone cares enough in 2126 to try and figure out why, they’re going to have to take into account the politics of this era, which is to say the leftist-progressive socialist ideology that has governed Oakland for a generation.
There’s no guarantee that any city or civilization is ensured of survival, but we can make certain assumptions. New York City is almost certain to remain a major world-city a thousand years from now. So are Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, London. San Francisco? Not so much. Florence was a world-city in the Renaissance but lost that status as Italy lost its own status as a world power.
Most likely Oakland will be remembered as an interesting but failed experiment in Americanism. It was one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the world. It contained one of the world’s biggest LGBTQ populations. It was at the geographic heart of the Bay Area. It was beautiful, with a perfect climate. It could have been a contender in a post-modern world, a thrilling mixture of humankind co-existing in peace and harmony, but as we can see today, that never happened, nor it is ever likely to. Instead, its very demographic complexity led to identity politics and infighting, and it failed to develop the leaders who might have united the city. In fact, the leaders who did rise up contributed to its demise by taking sides, further dividing us. Most identified with the city’s Black residents, thereby stoking racial divisions with Whites, Asians and Hispanics, and undermining the city’s attractiveness to Silicon Valley. Nobody had the historic vision to understand that playing to particular interest groups is a recipe for failure. Jerry Brown came closest, but as soon as he left office (in 2007), his vision collapsed as a coalition of former Black Panthers and racial agitators seized power. By the time Ron Dellums took over, Oakland’s fate was sealed, as cynicism, obeisance to the unions, and racial polarization boiled over.
Maybe the Catholics are correct and there’s something ineffably contaminated about humans. On the surface we seem to have everything required to build perfect societies, but we never do. In some cases, such as Oakland, we seem to enjoy promoting the worst people to power. It’s almost a will to fail. It’s all so drearily predictable: how could anyone not have foreseen the destruction that Libby Schaaf would wreak on Oakland? Why would anyone have expected anything different under Sheng Thao or Barbara Lee? These people all fiddled while Oakland burnt, and they cheer-led the arsonists on. And we, the People, stood aside and empowered them.
If there is a single image from today that historians will remember in the year 2126, it will be the last Oakland A’s game played at the Coliseum. Oakland’s racist, far-left radicals deliberately chased all three major league teams out of town, an effort led by Rebecca Kaplan, Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao. It was a criminal act that ended in the final demise of Oakland’s pretentions of being a great American city. The A’s won that last home game, and it felt good, but in the end, the city of Oakland lost. I hope and pray that the people who conspired to kill Oakland will be thoroughly repudiated by history and will one day be hauled up before a Court of Justice.
Steve Heimoff