I was sitting on a stone wall in my neighborhood, resting before resuming my trudge up the long steep hill home with my groceries, when I noticed a leaf fluttering to the ground. An oak leaf, dried and golden brown, from one of the gnarled old oaks on my block. I watched it fall and then it struck the asphalt with the distinct “click” of a kiss. Then it rested for a moment on the street before the breeze deployed it further down the hill.

I’ve never cared whether hard-working Latino workers in California had documentation or not. Didn’t bother me in the least and still doesn’t. All I knew, from working for decades in the wine and restaurant industries, was that they were some of the most diligent, honest, happy and lovely people I’d ever met.

Progressives will do everything they can to steal money from anyone they perceive as having “wealth” and transferring it to anyone that doesn’t. This is their entire reason for life: to redistribute income among the various classes. In leftwing circles, this is known as equity. In rational circles, it’s called communism.

They do have certain rights in common with the rest of us. But among those rights is not the right to camp on a public street. I don’t care how much homeless advocates whine and complain about homeless people being shoddily treated by cities. The unalterable fact is that homeless people do not and should not have the right to “live” wherever they want, and nothing they argue, no amount of shaming us, will change that.

So our great Alameda County Board of Supervisors, led by the intrepid Nikki Fortunato Bas, has agreed to divide $1.83 billion from Measure W, the 2020 Gouge-the-Taxpayers tax, into three “buckets,” the largest of which (85%) will go toward what they deem “the county’s long-term strategy to combating homelessness.”