Throw the Bums Out: But Do So with Compassion—Coolidge Style Compassion

by John Derbyshire

 

On a recent business trip to San Francisco, I decided to take a look at the new Asian Art Museum, which is in the old municipal library building, on one side of the downtown Civic Center Plaza. The museum is very impressive; but in making my way to it on foot across the downtown area, I acquired impressions of a different kind, which affected other senses besides the visual. I encountered San Francisco’s appalling vagrancy problem.

 

It is in the downtown area that the problem is most obvious. I have never seen so many street people in one place. Crossing the plaza to the museum, I found myself weaving my way through platoons, companies, battalions of them. Here a ragged, emaciated woman mumbling to herself and making complicated hand gestures like a Buddhist priest; there a huge black-bearded Rasputin of a man in a floor-length heavy overcoat, pushing a shopping cart piled high with filthy bundles; across the way a little knot of florid winos arguing loudly and ferociously about something; sitting on the sidewalk where I passed, a youngish black woman, gaunt and nearly bald, with some sort of horrid skin disease all over her face and scalp, croaking something at me I couldn’t understand.

 

As I said, the Asian Art Museum is housed in the old municipal library. There is a $10 dollar door fee, so the vagrants do not enter. On the other side of the plaza, however, is a spiffy new library, built on a cost of $137 million. It has practically been colonized by the street people. Defying the best efforts of a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system, the tang of unwashed bodies pervades the place. One row of computers (like all modern libraries, the new San Francisco municipal is long on computers and short on books—Nicholson Baker has written very angrily about this) is occupied entirely by vagrants watching DVD movies. One of them has his feet, clad in filthy sneakers, up on the desk. I got chatting with a security guard, a fellow in the last weary stages of cynicism.

 

He took me to the security office and showed me their “gallery” –an entire wall covered with polaroid snapshots of library patrons apprehended for variety offenses. The snapshots were arranged by offense category, each category tagged with a three-digit police code. The guard interpreted the codes for me. “These are the assaults… here you have the substance abusers…these here were defacing the books…” I pointed to a block of 40 or 50 photographs he’d missed. What had their offense been? “Oh, those are the masturbators.”

 

A block east of the museum is U.N. Plaza, boasting a modern-style fountain –a sprawling arrangement of granite slabs and water jets, designed by a world-famous architect. This has naturally proved irresistible to the armies of vagrants. For years they urinated, defecated, and discarded drug paraphernalia there –the last to such a degree that the water was dangerous with chemical contaminants, even if you could bring yourself to ignore the waste products. The city’s Department of Public Works used to conduct a daily clean-up. Early this year, though, they decided that the cost was more than could be justified. In March, a chain-link fence was erected around the whole thing, in the teeth of, it goes without saying, vehement protests from “advocates for the homeless.” (The word homeless is the current euphemism for vagrants, publicized by activist New York attorney Robert Hayes in the early 1980s.)

 

It is not too hard to figure out why San Francisco has so many vagrants. Indigent adults receive cash payments of $320 to $395 a month, with only a nominal work requirement for the able-bodied. Supplemented by a little panhandling, this is a tidy sum in the agreeable Northern California climate. When I wrote about the situation on the magazine’s website, I got e-mails from people in neighboring towns and counties saying: “Please don’t write about this. We’re happy with things just as they are. San Francisco takes in all our homeless people, so we’re spared the problem…”

 

Naturally this logic is lost on the city’s irredeemably liberal Board of Supervisors and their soulmates in the local press. One of the latter, Ilene Lelchuk of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently began a sentence thus: “With San Francisco’s homeless population growing despite the millions of dollars the city spends annually to help its most desperate residents…” Note that word despite. We spend more and more on the homeless, and still their numbers increase. How can this be? What a strange and wonderful thing is the liberal mind! (Recall the similarly clueless New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”)

 

By last year the situation had already gotten so bad that city voters were presented with a November ballot initiative, Proposition N, under whose terms that $395 monthly cash handout would be reduced to $59, the balance being replaced by city-provided food and shelter. This “Care Not Cash” initiative was passed, with 60 percent of voters in favor. That of course outraged the city’s left-wing activists, who immediately challenged the vote in court. On May 8 Superior Court judge Ronald Quidachay ruled that only the Board of Supervisors can set city welfare policy, and that the ballot initiative was therefore invalid. The hundred-dollar-a-week handouts to anyone who shows up will-continue –in a city that is looking at a $350 million deficit this year.

 

The United States of America was founded on the notion of self-support, of people taking care of their families, joining with neighbors to solve common problems in a humane and sensible way. Those common problems would include the occasional citizen, like Huckleberry Finn’s pap, who could not, or stubbornly would not, look after himself, and for whom some public provision should be made. When a person “came upon the town,” the town would give him some minimal aid, while of course private citizens, if they felt inclined, could exercise the virtue of private charity to any degree they wished. The recipient was, however, expected to defer to community standards. If he persistently committed gross violations of those standards –relieving himself in the town fountain would certainly have counted –he was locked up or institutionalized.

 

This was a sound system, widely admired outside our borders. Listen to the most American of American presidents, Calvin Coolidge: “The principle of service is not to be confused with a weak and impractical sentimentalism.” “Self-government means self-support.” “The normal must care for themselves.”

 

There was nothing callous about this attitude. Everyone understood that the feeble-minded and insane needed special care in state institutions. (The famously parsimonious Coolidge made a speech in 1916, when he was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, defending the robust state funding of insane asylums.) Our present age, for all its humanitarian cant, is much crueler. Nationwide, 39 percent of vagrants have some diagnosable mental-health problem—victims, for the most part, of the deinstitutionalization that began after the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act.

 

Crueler, and also more careless of the dignity and independence of the individual. That applies not only to the individual vagrant, but to the self-supporting citizen, too. As you cross Civic Center Plaza they leer at you, yell at you, sometimes harass you. If you are a woman, they make lewd remarks at you. All this we are supposed to put up with in the name of “compassion” and “rights.” And put up with it we do! Why?