There are many YouTube videos about the closing of Nordstrom downtown in the SF Shopping Centre–adding to the long list of Walgreens’ drugstore closures–and the New Whole Foods at Hyde and Eighth and Market. Also in the Google algorithm are stories about crime, trash, needles, and homelessness–especially the interviews on California Insider with Siyamak Khorrami from the Epoch Times of Southern Cal. A recent post by Siyamak with Angela Alioto confirmed my worst suspicions about Mayor Ed Lee:
This video explains the cause of my sinking feeling in the spring of 2014–during the IPO of Facebook.
I feel like a turncoat by leaving San Francisco during the epidemic and moving to Honolulu, and I am obsessed by returning to San Fran. Is it to prove the naysayers wrong about this city? Is my heart being torn by moving away instead of fighting the fight? Am I the lucky one? It doesn’t actually seem that way–most of time–or some of the time?
What becomes glaringly clear by those who post that they are glad to leave the butthole of ess eff. (My spell check wants to recreate ess eff with the words less off or mess off!) No where (Knowhere) are there any residents who still live in San Francisco describing how they feel, or why they still live in San Fran.
Apparently, we are liberal retards that are getting just what we deserve by the way we are voting. That God is punishing the ‘New Deal’ Sodom and Gomorrah for being a city full of sinners. [Sodom and Gomorrah were two legendary biblical cities destroyed by God for their wickedness. Their story parallels the Genesis flood narrative in its theme of God’s anger provoked by man’s sin.] –That we are sick and twisted by obedience to our Mayor for the lock down during the pandemic. But no one of the critics ever questions why we did what we did, or what our thinking is then, and now.
San Franciscans have recent memory of a pandemic, whereby the government stood by and did nothing. This would have been an apparent Godsend if this was the attitude taken by the government with Covid-19. We SF residents remember all those who died during the Aids epidemic, and found it easy to OBEY the rules being set by our Mayor and the CDC. Sarcastically, when they called me for an interview, I reminded them that they could just as easily been called the Center for Disease Observation. But the point is, Franciscans remembered our recent epidemic and knew what to do. We found the cases of Covid being reported after large in-person Republican fund raisers –where attendees wore no masks–and couldn’t fathom this thinking–and shrugged. Our compassion always lies in the less fortunate.
As for the homeless problem, in the above interview–Angela explains then Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to keep people off the streets. Unfortunately, Ed Lee shut down the 18 properties created to provide the ongoing services needed to prevent a return to the streets in 2014, just two years after the plan was completed in 2012.
Which brings up my main defensive point about the conditions on the “Streets of San Francisco.”
We San Franciscans were–and are–able to handle the homeless problem up to a point, but if states and municipalities are going to keep sending their addicts and alcoholics to San Francisco, because it has a tolerant attitude and a large treatment budget–there is only so much influx any city–can handle. As a bus driver I saw this unfolding during my 21 year career, and I figured out how to do my job by keeping my job.
I thought this was worth writing about.
One person in a large Saturday recovery group was insistent that I not be able to submit my meditations to a recovery handbook under production, and that I was in violation of several spiritual principles. He took great pride in cutting my writings from the submission list.
Learning how not be in a reaction mode, I took to the creation mode. Putting a “See” in front of a ‘reaction,’ I turned from a negative Reactive shock into a Creative one. Reactions with a C become Creations! I wrote a book in meditation essay form about how I used mediation to stay at a good job in a whacky city!
Hence my piece da resistance:
The Dao of Doug: A Bus Driver's Perspective 