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San Francisco politics, the same old shit
By
Joshua Citrak
For those of you who give a flying fuck, the top five mayoral candidates debated Thursday, September 26 at the University of San Francisco with sponsorship from faith-based and other non-profit organizations that serve the poor. Discussions included such riveting topics as, the ubiquitous homeless crisis, affordable housing and rent control, or as many San Franciscans have come to realize, the same goddamned issues we’ve heard debated in the previous election and the one before that and the one before that and the one before that.
Falling in step with earlier mayoral candidates, Angela Alioto, Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano and Susan Leal gave us all a taste of the same vague rhetoric that we’ve heard a thousand fucking times. Like Alioto’s promise to ‘go down into the streets and bring the homeless off the streets’, or Gonzalez’s assertion that the city (read: us tax payers) needs to purchase more land to give to construction and development companies to build and manage affordable housing.
Wow. Those are really great fucking ideas. But what Gonzalez must not realize is the city already
owns enough property to house the homeless, it just chose to use it for live/work lofts and Pac Bell Park instead. And secondly, many homeless don’t
want to leave the streets, deeming the streets ‘safer’ than shelters. Alioto, when confronted with that, reportedly shook her fist in the air and said, ‘they can come off the streets the easy way, or the hard way, it makes no difference to me’.
Then there’s Gavin Newsom who’s earned a fair bit of anonymity from his ‘care not cash’ initiative. Newsom, who actually believes he is a medieval knight laying siege to a castle has rendered the homeless problem mute by his ‘starve ‘em out’ tactics.
And it was Newsom, who is the front runner, that was mostly on the defensive as the other candidates attacked him on his questionable use of catapults and flaming canon balls to beat the homeless into submission.
“We need a mayor who isn’t going to demonize the homeless,” said Susan Leal in the midst of a long winded, sycophantic speech on the plight of San Francisco’s homeless.
When told that most, if not all of the homeless population is not registered to vote, Leal promptly shut up.
However, Ammiano, ever the panderer, took up where Leal left off unfortunately, I got up to take a piss and didn’t hear what he said.
“We need to stop politicizing it, stop the mismanagement and fraud,” I heard him say as I returned to my seat.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked the guy sitting next to me.
“You think I’m a mind reader? With his lisp, I can’t understand what the hell he’s saying. All I know is his lips are moving and it sounds like the same old bullshit to me,” he replied then got up to leave.
And the debate basically went on like that, each candidate getting fed easy-bake questions to which they responded with nonsensical comments, head nodding, ass grabbing and a lot of finger pointing.
I wondered where the tough questions were. I wondered why no one brought up the most basic fact of this issue, that living and sleeping on the streets is illegal in San Francisco, yet the police, being too busy assaulting innocent citizens, nor anybody else seem intent on enforcing that law.
I wondered why no one brought up the fact that the homeless population was having a negative effect on tourism, our city’s main source of income, downtown and around Union Square. Or how the city, deeply in debt, could afford to pay hundreds of workers to clean up after the homeless or tend to the homeless when they have a medical emergency, when it would be cheaper and easier if there were enough shelters, dependency programs and other preventive care provided.
It seems like San Francisco cannot afford the ounce of prevention after being stuck with the bill for the cure, I thought, while I hearing all five candidates screaming in unison that we need to spend
more fucking money on the problem. We need more shelters, more soup kitchens, more job training programs and more addiction centers. Only Newsom remained silent, humming to himself softly as he polished his cutlass. As to how we were going to pay for the programs, no one had a clue, so I could only assume that it was just empty campaign shit talking, or they were secretly gonna shove another excise tax up our ass. Of course, neither the press, nor the moderator, cared to ask how much was enough, seeing how San Francisco
already spends nearly twenty thousand dollars more per homeless person than any other major city in America.
So, that’s my question to you, gentle reader, how much is enough? How many Street Sheets can you buy? How many quarters, cigarettes, halves of sandwiches or forty ounce bottles of malt liquor are you willing to carry around with you to satiate our homeless? Just a little heads up, you know, they ain’t goin’ nowhere. Because, one of the above candidates will be our next mayor, and guess what? Until someone asks the tough questions and until San Francisco can come down from its liberal high-horse and force some answers from these fucking clowns, we’re gonna be in for more of the same old shit.
Copyright ©
2003 Joshua Citrak
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