Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
11:30 - These enlightened times	(top)
San Francisco is one hell of a beautiful city. I love taking out-of-state visitors there, to walk out on the Golden Gate Bridge, look out across the sparkling bay to the gleaming skyline, to drive up the Marin headlands to where the old WWII anti-naval gun battery was and look down at the grandeur of the landscape and at the neat white grids of the residential parts of the city giving way to the sharp and dramatic spires of the downtown skyscrapers like a seismograph suddenly registering a new temblor. However, there's a problem: I can't take visitors much closer than that. Oh, sure, we can hit places like North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf and the Castro; but drive down Market Street? Walk up to Union Square? Head down into the Mission District to see the Metreon and Moscone Center? Go over to the Civic Center for a show in the theater district? Unless you can duck from a Starbucks to a Taco Bell to another Starbucks and repeat the process all the way down the long blocks to your destination, you're going to be literally stepping over so many homeless people that you end up hating yourself for the very excess and frivolity of what you're venturing into the area to do. You feel like a plutocrat just for being able to afford a Subway without arguing with the clerk over the posted food-stamp acceptance policy. I think it's worse in San Francisco than most places, too; one thing I noticed about New York, when I was there in October, was that as raw and crowded and under-construction and hurried as everything was, I didn't see a single panhandler from Times Square to Chinatown. The NYC subway system is missing walls and floors and looks like the skeletal remains of some steam-punk Jules Verne dystopia, but it felt way more wholesome than the space-age BART, somehow. Chris' Australian family was just here visiting, and while they gushed over how much they loved sightseeing in San Francisco, the first observation they made, and with great shock, was how many "beggars" there were. There's no denying it. And all we could say in its defense was point out that aside from the fact that cities like San Francisco and San Diego are at least warm enough to be homeless in, the state's mental illness treatment policy has been such that everyone who's ever had debilitating drug problems or can only barely fend for himself ends up on the street. After all, you can't "institutionalize" people anymore. All of which is by way of preamble to this post by Glenn Reynolds, whose wife made a documentary on this very subject, and who has some things to say�and some posted reader feedback in support of it�regarding the "de-institutionalization" movement. And it itself springs from this observation by Jeff Jarvis: And the real issue isn't homelessness. It's insanity. The laws in this country make it impossible to commit and help even the obviously and often the dangerously insane. I say that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is as much at fault as any politician, for it made the institution frightening and the people who run it bad guys. Read Jarvis' whole post; his perspective is from the New York end of things, and he notes some reasons why the atmosphere there is different from here in the City by the Bay. I'm not sure what political tradition is consistent with wanting to give a fair shake to institutional practices that probably served us better in the past than we like to let on nowadays, even ones that cost state taxpayers large amounts of money. But you know, I don't care. It isn't "compassionate" to allow people to be on the streets out of some perverse knowledge that "at least they're not being locked up", or a twisted and practiced revulsion at the idea of wanting to "clean up" downtown and make it "safe" for our bourgeois pursuits. It isn't "principled" to demand that the homeless make their own way in the world, when the vast majority of them aren't equipped to do so if they wanted to. This is not just a function of the system. It's an outlier to the system, something that the system needs to take explicitly into account when figuring out what is in our interest as a society. I'd like to be able to walk down Market Street with friends from out of town with the same devil-may-care attitude that lets people crane their necks upward in Times Square, unconcerned with where their feet are going. This isn't because I want the helpless shuffled off to where they're out of sight, out of mind; I know that being tripped over is a lot worse than being the one doing the tripping, and just about anything has to be better. For everyone.