When it comes to drug treatment and housing for the Bay Area’s thousands of homeless addicts, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is that many if not most of those offered help refuse it. They simply prefer to remain living in the streets and to continue to use their drugs of choice. And we—civil society—are no closer to figuring out how to deal with this than we were years ago, when the problem first arose.

I find it fascinating that Thao is now promising to end encampments sometime next year. Thank you Mayor Thao! It took you a while, but you’ve finally accepted the advice of the Coalition for a Better Oakland, namely that Oakland must formally put an end to these dirty camps, immediately and forever. We’ve been calling for precisely that for years, but you, and the politicians that support you, resisted. But events have so turned out that even you, in your stubborn embrace of wokeness, have realized that your job, not to mention public opinion, requires you to clean up our city and get rid of these awful slums.

The word “woke” gets a lot of attention these days, but what does it really mean? I think it means whatever the speaker intends it to mean, which can be almost anything. When Ron DeSantis uses the word “woke,” he means something very different from what I mean.

Whenever I hear some left wing radical talk about “the community” I immediately think “What community are you talking about?” Carroll Fife talks about “the community.” Cat Brooks talks about “the community.” Progressives love referring to “the community” as if all of us in Oakland are on their side.

When I read the Chronicle’s front page article, “Thousands of officers could be decertified,” I thought, “Good. Let California’s new police decertification law fire up to 5 percent of all the cops in the state. Maybe the resulting crime wave will show people how much we need cops.”