If you can read this, you probably aren’t a young Black person in Oakland, where, according to ABC News, only one-in-three Oakland students can read at grade level. Studies find that African-American students read at the lowest level, (20.9%) of proficient or advanced, while Whites are at the the highest level (68%).

School districts. Healthcare systems. City general funds. The Courts. They always seem to be broke, and then their unionized workers strike against them demanding greater salaries and benefits. The agencies say they can’t afford the union demands, and so the stalemate goes. We should be used to it by now.

Well, I’ve finally been persuaded to read “Young Man in a Hurry,” Gavin Newsom’s memoir. Every presidential wannabe publishes a book at some point before an election, and Newsom is no exception. Usually these books quickly disappear into $1 bins at the bookstore. But Newsom’s seems to be the exception: it’s at the top of the best-seller lists. I’ll have more to say when I finish reading it.

We’d sit in the bleachers (25 cents), me and my friends, or in the grandstands, if we had 75 cents, which we usually didn’t. It was at the old Yankee Stadium, which was only three blocks from where we lived. This was in the mid-1950s, when the N.Y. Yankees made it easy, almost mandatory to be a fan.

The short answer is no. As George Harrison sang, “If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat. If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.” Or, as Pink Floyd put it, “All that you touch, and all that you see, all that you taste, all you feel, and all that you loved, and all that you hate, all you distrust, all you save, and all that you give, and all that you deal, and all that you buy…” We’ll tax it all, and more.