For San Francisco and California, "The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost!"

    As the racist minister of Barack and Michelle Obama—Jeeremiah Wright—graphically proclaimed to his crowed Black Liberation Theology church in Chicago some years ago when he decried American foreign policy, “The chickens are coming home to roost!” The repeated nightly attacks upon multiple businesses in the San Francisco Bay area are simply the logical consequences of that city’s Progressive Left policies. Since 1964 the city has not had a Republican mayor, and a progression of ultra-liberal ordinances and Progressive liberals have pretty much turned the once-beautiful city into a third world Soddom and Gemorrah. The untreated mentally ill and drug-induced addicts are everywhere—generally left to fend for themselves on the streets. Public vagrancy is a menace. Laws against public urination and defecation have been done away with, making the city a real health risk. As a sanctuary city, local ordinances have made it impossible for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest criminals who have committed all types of felonies upon the law abiding citizens who pay the taxes there. Students at Berkeley and other liberal post-secondary routinely call for defunding the police. Its prosecuting attorney, Chesa Boudin—the son of Weather Underground terrorists who left three police officers dead from a heist in 1981—has refused to prosecute career criminals and repeat offenders. In the hope that the city can still be saved, he is now facing a recall election by outraged citizens. 

     The city’s decline cannot be attributed, as some claim, to the harmful effects of Covid. In 2015 there were 60,491 complaints to police, but only 125 people were arrested.  “The city took 25,899 reports of car break-ins in 2015,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports. This represented a 77 percent increase over the five years beginning in 2010. 

     Even liberals seem to have had enough! For years, The Atlantic has warned visitors to the city were seeing hundreds of rental cars broken into and cameras, luggage, passports, and personal items stolen by ‘smash and grab’ thieves. The New York Times reports, “Recent data from the F.B.I. show that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top 50 cities.” In 1919 Edelman Intelligence reported in a poll that 63% of California millennials now wish to leave the state. CNBC also ranks the state 48th in cost of doing business, which may be why thousands of firms are leaving California for friendlier locales. In 2016, McKinsey Global Institute reported that half of California households cannot afford the cost of housing in their local market. 

     As a never-ending list of Progressive policies continues to rock the city and state, more and more Americans have come to the realization that almost all of the injuries are self-inflicted. Will things turn around in the Bay City? As more and more sane people pack up and leave for Red State America, the best guess is that things will only get worse.   

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Jack Bovee

Fort Myers, FL 
The writer has been a social studies educator, founder of Rho Kappa--the National Social Studies Honor Society--and a former Elementary School Principal of the Year in Lee County, Florida. He may be reached at: jsbovee@aol.com.