I was chatting the other day with a friend. I’ve patronized his business for decades. I know his family, and I like and respect him quite a bit. He’s a pillar of his community.
We were talking about how much we’re fed up with Oakland’s government. His particular gripe was business taxes, which, like property taxes, are really high here, and continue to go up. Like a lot of professionals, his income is high, but so are his expenses, including rent on his place of business. He feels, like so many of us, that Oakland government exists for one reason only: to extort money from hard-working people in order to fund their socialist, redistributionist schemes.
My friend, whom I’ll call Thomas, was really upset. At one point, he blurted out, “I don’t even care about homeless people,” during a part of our conversation in which the topic came up. I think Thomas immediately regretted his words, for he stopped, and while he didn’t exactly blush, it felt like he had.
Why wouldn’t Thomas care about the homeless? For that matter, why don’t I? I mean, we both “care” to the extent we wish they weren’t out there. We both wish we could press a magic button and make the whole issue go away. Neither of us takes pleasure in those people out there in the rain and cold. Thomas is himself a decent, good-hearted man. He volunteers to help poor people overseas, at his own expense. His employees are every ethnicity you could name—and he is an employer lots of people would love to work for. I know his heart. I wish all Americans were like him.
But he’s pretty tired of the homeless and their dirty encampments, and with Oakland government taking more and more money from hard-working people like him. Thomas believes that America is a truly great land of opportunity. The child of immigrants, he worked his tail off to get a good education and then rose to the top of his profession. He raised his kids properly, and they’re now on their own way to an American success story.
Lots of people feel the same as Thomas, including me. But they’re afraid to admit it. So great is the pressure to feel sorry for homeless people, or at least refrain from criticizing them, that many Americans struggle, even within themselves, with the fact that they resent the homeless. They feel that homeless people by and large brought their predicament upon themselves. Why, then, should they—the productive class—be penalized so relentlessly to subsidize a class of what are basically parasites?
We have to have this conversation. To censor people like Thomas from expressing their real feelings is stupid, cruel and counter-productive. It’s the kind of cancel culture that infuriates so many Americans about the far left. When one isn’t even able to speak his mind, one grows alienated from those who won’t let him—and it’s precisely that feeling that has turned so many working people toward Trump. He has said to them, in effect, “Hey, I feel the same as you. But I’m not going to let the wokes shut me up.” People who have been silenced by the left appreciate that about him. Even though they’re aware of the nauseating, vulgar aspects of his personality, they’re delighted that so high and mighty a personage as the President of the United States hears and acknowledges their voices.
Don’t get me wrong: I loathe Trump. I would imprison him for a wide variety of crimes, including inciting the insurrection in January, 2023, his horrible lies about the 2020 election having been stolen, and for personally enriching himself through abusing his power. But Trump is only the most visible symptom of the frustration the American people, or large majorities of them, feel about the Democratic Party. There are tens of millions of Thomases out there. They pay taxes, they vote, they are the backbones of our communities. It may be too late for Oakland to come to its senses, but Oakland increasingly is an outlier among American cities, even among cities in the Bay Area. If Thomas relocates his business from Oakland, his customers will suffer, but the question is, how long does the left think it can muzzle, rob and insult Thomas before he packs up, gives Oakland the finger, and leaves?
Steve Heimoff