In San Francisco, now even the black communities are starting to protest its crime and dereliction
In San Francisco, the Asian-American community has drawn a lot of press for having had it up to here with crime, bums, dereliction, drugs, hookers, lootings, wokester education, and openly declared violent hate crimes on the street.
They threw out a slew of Board of Education wokesters plus the wokester let-'em-out district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in a recall earlier this year, but little has changed. Wokeism remains, the mayor isn't up to the job because she still thinks the solution is to throw money at the problems, and the crime keeps spreading. With no plan in action, citizens there elected more Democrats in the midterm.
The Asians made an impression, though, and now their movement to tell the ruling oligarchy to stop the lunacy has now spread to the gay community, which is conducting a tax strike, and now...the black community.
According to the San Francisco Standard (hat tip: Hot Air):
At a meeting Monday night at San Francisco's Third Baptist Church, Rev. Amos Brown and other Black community leaders called on the city to fix what they described as an escalating homelessness and drug problem. These issues, they said, disproportionately hurt the historically Black Fillmore District, an already vulnerable community.
Several dozen people attended the meeting, with its tone alternating between desperation and anger. Speaker after speaker sounded the same note, calling for an increased police presence. Further, they want to require homeless drug addicts to get treatment and prevent them from camping on the street.
"My grandma used to say, 'Your freedom ends where my nose begins,'" said Brown, who is also president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP and a former local politician. "When homeless folks cause problems, their freedom ends. That's not being mean, it's being what I call engaging in responsible compassion."
Community members said the parking lot of the Fillmore District's Safeway is ground zero, and that Safeway was turning a blind eye to the problems. They cited cars blasting music, human feces everywhere, harassment from drug dealers, syringes in planters and having to witness "X-rated acts."
The details just keep getting grosser and grosser, with small children's elementary schools finding themselves in the crossfire, white bums doing drugs getting onto the rooftops, and dogs attacking people.
Obviously, something is going on here. The black community, which has always been a Democrat dumping ground taken advantage of because of its loyal voter base, is starting to rouse and say "enough."
That means the discontent is complete in that solid blue city.
And it makes perfect sense that it is, particularly in the Fillmore part of town.
Unlike the more impoverished black districts of that city, such as the Western Addition or Hunts Point, or any of the black-dominant projects abutting both sides of the Mission district, the Fillmore is a black middle-class area, not far from the famous Painted Lady Victorian houses of that fair city.
When I was a cub reporter in that city 20-some years ago, one of my assignments was to go around the city and find out what young people were thinking. I did. The black kids in the projects spoke of the hardships of poverty and their fear of crime and drug-dealers. The Samoan kids of the Dolores Park area spoke of their upcoming Mormon missionary trips. The white kids of the Stonestown Galleria spoke of the importance of finding "Navy men" as boyfriends. The Asian-American kids of Clement Street spoke of their fears of not getting into a good school.
The Fillmore district kids? Going to church, getting into college, and finding the best hat to wear. That's a middle-class concern, not rank poverty.
In other words, these people have something they've worked for, something they own, and something they must defend or watch it go down the drain of wokesterism.
Hot Air has a very good piece by John Sexton with more thoughts here. (Dart to their photo editor for featuring a picture of the tony Union Street/Marina area in its story about the Fillmore. Wrong neighborhood, guys!)
San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, has good intentions and certainly isn't the worst creature the city has ever had in its leadership, but she has little idea about how to solve that city's problems other than by throwing more money at homeless "service centers," which tend to bring in more homeless. She doesn't know how to fix the city and, thus far, hasn't done much. That's a green light for the blight to spread, and now the black communities, which are in fact hit hardest, are starting to rise up, too.
That's a clarion call to the left to start looking at fixing problems instead of blaming Republicans and engaging in the politics of symbolism. The rot is bone-deep now that even the black community, or at least the richer part of it, is starting to protest the lunacy.
Whom do these incompetent and corrupt ruling wokesters have left?
Image: Cullen328 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.