California Dreamin’

California’s three largest cities; San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego are all struggling with an enormous homelessness problem and the after effect is wreaking havoc among residents.

De facto tent cities, sidewalks crowded with human feces and hypodermic needles, garbage piled high in the streets, open drug use and aggressive pan handling have transformed large swaths of these formerly great cities in to mini 3^rd world countries.

Whoops, almost forgot about the typhus epidemic due to excessive garbage pile ups and an accompanying rat population explosion.  Nothing says being a forward thinking, progressive city like a reoccurrence of mid-evil disease!

I would say the inmates are running the asylum except the word inmate is outlawed in California. Kinda joking but kinda not.  According to this Los Angeles Times article, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently submitted a proposal to scrap words like “felon” in favor of “returning resident” or “formerly incarcerated person.”

I kid you not.  The board’s reasoning is to sanitize language in the criminal justice system by using:

“…..people-first language — phrases that strip any objectification or pejorative descriptions for more neutral and positive descriptors. 

A parolee could be described as a person under supervision. Convict could be referred to as a “currently incarcerated person, while a juvenile offender or delinquent would be described as a young person impacted by the justice system.”

 I’m sorry, what?  A new city Poop Patrol department had to be created because your sidewalks are so overloaded with crap and you’re worried certain words may be offensive to convicts?  Just how did we get to this point?

In my opinion, California’s decision makers at all levels of state and local government have failed so miserably at fixing problems they themselves helped to create that their only way to save face was to legislate such problems out of existence.

Dealing with complex issues surrounding homelessness?  Well then, just provide free housing with no requirement to stop using drugs/alcohol, allow makeshift campsites to take over neighborhood parks and turn a blind eye to public defecation. Poof, homeless problem solved!

Overcrowded prison problem?  Enact a rule that turns what were once felonies in to misdemeanors.  Sure open drug use, car thefts, shoplifting and “smash and grab” crimes will spike, but the prison population will surely shrink.

And how to go about reducing the number of kids getting expelled from schools?  Why just swoop that magic legislative wand and enact Senate Bill 419 that prohibits expulsions in K-12 schools.  You’ll be amazed at how quickly those expulsion rates drop!

See how easy it is to solve tough, entrenched problems? How will California handle all this winning?  

So what is really going on here? Are California lawmakers following a purposeful directive that encourages people to escape accountability for their own bad behavior and increases chaos for the rest of us?

Or are they just incredibly myopic and stupid? My money is on the latter but it really doesn’t matter.  The sad, hard truth is that lives are being and will continue to be destroyed by nonsense like this.

If someone is repeatedly making poor life choices, whether it’s acting up in class, doing drugs, going to the bathroom in the streets, or shoplifting, you’re not doing them any favors by eliminating consequences for the bad behavior. You’re just providing a bigger shovel for them to make the hole they’re stuck in deeper and setting them up for failure down the road.

And it’s not just California either, this type of magical thinking occurs in legislative offices all over the country.  The stunning cowardice of politicians and their inability to tell people things that might upset them, has contributed greatly to the cultural divide (it’s their fault, not yours and if you elect me I will punish them) and further entrenched the victimhood mentality our aggrieved culture is saturated with.

The devastating consequences of all this cannot be over stated.  But hey, the idiots in charge get to crow about being problem solvers and virtue signal how compassionate they are.  No surprise there.

The really mystery, as I asked in California’s War On The Poor, is why do we citizens continually reelect these opportunistic morons?