Chaos by the Bay: The Truth About Homelessness in San Francisco
There&#x27;s an interesting counterplay of narration vs content going on when the video starts quoting the city. It starts showing (recalled) District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaking[1]:<p>&gt; <i>The movement we built must continue to grow. It must demand that San Francisco make it easier to get help than it is to get high on our streets.</i><p>Then overdubbing Chesea talking, it says:<p>&gt; <i>Under the leadership of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the city has released nearly half of all it&#x27;s prisoners from the county jail and decriminalized tent camping, drug use, prosititution, and public defecation.</i><p>Returning to Chesea&#x27;s audio,<p>&gt; <i>It must demand that we stop using the jail as the primary place to treat people suffering from mental illness.</i><p>This is not my city &amp; I don&#x27;t live anywhere near here. It seems like a bad situation. I can have sympathy for what seems like a really bad situation. But this video seems to be trying to make a point about the city, about it&#x27;s failure, and while I can agree that what&#x27;s happening isn&#x27;t working, while I can agree this seems terrible, I agree with Chesa Boudin here 100%. The counter-narration atop him, trying to shade him &amp; whatever is afoot here, does not resonate. Jails are not the place.<p>That said, we did just come from a segment that I do find some affinity for, a man who had lived on the streets as an addict, talking about how homelessness is not a crime, drug use is not a crime, but you are responsible for your actions &amp; what you do.<p>Eric Adams, NYC mayor, was on NPR pretty recently &amp; I don&#x27;t know a lot, but hearing him talk about a civic obligation to the to the mentally ill, to the utterly lost of our society, how there is a societal obligation to not let this be their lives forever was at first a bit terrifying &amp; horrific, very police state. But I tend, ultimately, to agree, that we have to have the courage to explore where an individual has shown unable to exercise their individual liberties, and to consider what obligation the state has to them (hopefully more so than the rest of us) to intervene, to do something, even if against their will. Certainly institutionalization had enormous downsides in it&#x27;s institutionalized form, when Reagan sent so many to the streets &amp; broadly ended the idea of intervention, but I think a state that has an active hand in maintaining the welfare of citizens is increasingly a straight &amp; simple necessity, that jail and police are indeed not a viable nor helpful nor cost effective option, and that society would be better off being willing to accept some fumbling &amp; fucking up but still trying, trying to figure out how we can help. Demonizing &amp; fearing the problem- the growing problem, for America has diminishing opportunity alas and only seemingly ever expanding ever deepening pitfalls- is not helpful. Real aid is necessary, and even if the result isn&#x27;t always perfect I think there is an obligation to try, to keep trying, to analyze our performance of trying and to keep striving for better. Where-as we have been at a stalemate of enforcement for too long, a decision of permissible versus not, when in fact society&#x27;s obligation to maintain itself goes deeper.<p>This is all enormously hard, and touches all of us on so many polarizing fronts, of what role we think government has. But I hope we can find some common ground, some acceptance that we must move forward, must start to find real paths forwards, based on an agreement that the various things we have tried have so far been failures, and that we cannot stop nor resort to any of what has been done.<p>Chesa&#x27;s question is almost impossible to imagine an answer to today, of what we can do beyond jail people, and it takes a grit &amp; determinedness of a real patriot to believe, to push for better. Even though it seems so difficult, so terrifying, so hard, that solution has not scaled, is not fit to suppress the harshness of the reality of the times in which we live. Times are not good, and we must find courses of correction &amp; improvement. It terrifies me, and feels so far from where I would have been, but Eric Adams has a certain audacity here I admire; there is an obligation to the individual here, at the root of what society really is.<p>What I don&#x27;t like? This smarmy choad. Who voices over every reply to their trite &quot;gotcha shit&quot;. List to me!:<p>&gt; <i>And this is the tragic irony of San Francisco! [ed: author could not actually elevate their voice to an exclamation if they tried, so i&#x27;m imagining it.] The city&#x27;s leaders denounce inequality around the world [ed: if you editorialize this shit out of &amp; insubstantially nitpick] but have created a system of incredible inequality and incredible cruelty. All over SF there are men like this, trapped in addiction and psychosis with nowhere to go.</i><p>So... you blame the city, but it sounds like you have the same conclusions as basically everyone you so detest here? Never once have you given a single ray of hope, supported a single cause here, raised up a single potential: this video has been Fear Uncertain and Doubt forever, tearing down what there is &amp; what has been tried, with not an iota of recognition nor hope at any point. Should we just jail everyone? Is that your counter-proposal to mental illness? What would constitute help, if jailing everyone isn&#x27;t the answer? That seems to be the 64k question- what Chesa was demanding&#x2F;asking for the whole time- and simply claiming you are scoring goals because you can say &quot;what is is not working&quot; seems, well, cheap and easy. Yeah, and? Didn&#x27;t like this video.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI#t=6m44s">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI#t=6m44s</a>