San Francisco: "We Will Hold Them Accountable"
Our drive out of the Redwood forests south to San Francisco was slightly more fraught than our usual travel from place to place. For one, I have mixed emotions about the city. It’s a beautiful place, there’s great food and drink and culture, and lots of old friends from past jobs and when I lived there still call the Bay Area home. But I just don’t find it a particularly pleasant place. That’s hard to describe succinctly, but I was reminded of it soon enough.
But before we got into the city, as we approached the campground in Petaluma where we’d be leaving the Airstream for a few days, the sky started turning beautiful, slightly odd colors. Then more odd than beautiful, then more ominous than odd. Look out the window to the left and see the helicopter swooping past carrying a bucket of flame retardant goo below it and suddenly Zeynep is frantically searching the internet to see if we were about to drive straight into a wildfire.
Short answer was “not yet but give it a minute.” Turns out we were driving through the beginnings of what is now known as the Kincaid Fire in Sonoma County, which as of this writing is reported to be at 25,000+ acres and only 10% contained.
Over the course of our time in San Francisco we heard lots of talk about the fire (and the Tick Fire in southern California). The line that caught my attention most was California Governor Gavin Newsom declaring “we will hold them accountable” of PG&E, the electrical utility here that is now widely believed to be at least partially responsible for this and other recent wildfires. While it seems increasingly clear that PG&E was negligent at best over long periods of time and should face serious consequences, I kept finding myself wondering who the “we” and the “them” were in that sentence. “We,” the politicians who by and large were in office over the last decade and did little to exert significant oversight? “We,” the Californians who increasingly move out into wildfire country, or the voters who prefer to support brave firefighters over sensible forestry policy? “Them,” PG&E Incorporated, which has already printed billions for investors and exists only on paper? Or “them,” PG&E, the California utility that counts the California public pension system as a $100+ million investor? And while “we” hold “them” accountable, the fires will keep burning like we weren’t even here.
In San Francisco proper the thought kept coming back to me, but this time in the context of the very large and visible homeless population in the city. It’s difficult to wrap your head around in any productive way: no, homelessness can’t just be criminalized out of existence; no, just because it’s so visible here doesn’t mean it’s worse than cities where less so; and no, nobody is particularly to blame. But none of that changes that something is seriously wrong when in a thirty minute walk you see somebody injecting a needle while collapsed on the sidewalk, somebody puking up after taking a hit of I don’t know what, and somebody complaining to their friend that they need a fix because they’re dope-sick. The intersection of homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness is on bold display in much of the city. All the while, I hear the voice of Governor Gavin Newsom, former Mayor of San Francisco, talking about holding somebody accountable for something.
In my melancholy musings about San Francisco, I’ve skipped over nearly all of what was a really lovely trip. We had a lovely dinner with old friends in Oakland (and their glorious five and two year olds, who left me panting and sweating on the floor after less than an hour), took an outstanding walk to seven of San Francisco’s hills (if you’re interested, the walk is described here), got to catch up with friends over brunch in the Presidio (one of whom used to work in California politics and provided the most cogent explanation for the city’s homelessness crisis we’d heard yet), and dinner again with friends we hadn't seen in a while who fed us awesome tacos and whose children made Zeynep join them for teeth-brushing and read The Hug Machine to me before bed. All in all a really heart-warming trip full of friendship across time and space, even if set in a complicated city none of us quite know how to explain.
At the end of our last night in town we headed back to the campground and the Airstream so we could get an early start this morning. As I write this, there are 80-mph winds gusting in the area, they've evacuated the hospitals and closed the highways just a touch north of us, and CalFire just called in reinforcements from neighboring jurisdictions. Methinks time to move on.
