Battlegrounds
San Francisco has always been my favorite big city in the U.S. I first started coming here in the early 1980s, back in the days when I worked on image processing research projects down the road in Sunnyvale. We had it tough in those days, dear reader. We were trying to manipulate some extremely large files (megabytes worth!) of image data using fancy mathematical algorithms while saddled with woefully inadequate, early 1980s computing technology. It wasn't easy, but we were well-funded; it was all Ronald Reagan-era defense work. We built some very complicated hardware using millions of your 1980 tax dollars. Now, I'm pretty sure, this $2000 laptop that I'm using at the moment is probably ten times more powerful than anything that we developed back then. But the work that we did in those days is partly responsible, at least, for the fact that this laptop even exists. That's the rationale that I'm going with, anyway.
In any event I always tried to add a day or two onto my trips so that I could hang out a little in the City by the Bay. It is a lovely place, and it's still a lot of fun to do touristy things like huff and puff your way up Russian Hill and Coit Tower and to have a beer at Vesuvio in honor of all the dead Beat-era writers whose pictures adorn the walls. But on this trip I did something a little different - outside the lines of tourists waiting to ride the cable cars, away from the shadow of mega-stores like Nordstrom's, Abercrombie and Fitch and the like there is a part of town with the odd name of Tenderloin - and there you won't find many tourists. Instead, you'll find plenty of drug-addled, sad, shabby people, living in abject poverty in the heart of America's most beautiful city. In one snippet of conversation that I heard on the street, a tall gaunt white man with a ragged gray beard told his friend as I passed, "... and then I'm gonna get me some HEROIN..." That was all that I heard. And then I thought to myself, guns don't kill people, and people don't kill people. Drugs kill people, and drug abuse is destroying the fabric of our society from the inside out. It isn't the kind of destruction that's easy to see through the tinted windows of an SUV while driving through suburbia, but it's there. We're losing the war on drugs - badly. We're no longer even fighting the fight, really. And unless we drastically change our tactics, we will be defeated.
In any event I always tried to add a day or two onto my trips so that I could hang out a little in the City by the Bay. It is a lovely place, and it's still a lot of fun to do touristy things like huff and puff your way up Russian Hill and Coit Tower and to have a beer at Vesuvio in honor of all the dead Beat-era writers whose pictures adorn the walls. But on this trip I did something a little different - outside the lines of tourists waiting to ride the cable cars, away from the shadow of mega-stores like Nordstrom's, Abercrombie and Fitch and the like there is a part of town with the odd name of Tenderloin - and there you won't find many tourists. Instead, you'll find plenty of drug-addled, sad, shabby people, living in abject poverty in the heart of America's most beautiful city. In one snippet of conversation that I heard on the street, a tall gaunt white man with a ragged gray beard told his friend as I passed, "... and then I'm gonna get me some HEROIN..." That was all that I heard. And then I thought to myself, guns don't kill people, and people don't kill people. Drugs kill people, and drug abuse is destroying the fabric of our society from the inside out. It isn't the kind of destruction that's easy to see through the tinted windows of an SUV while driving through suburbia, but it's there. We're losing the war on drugs - badly. We're no longer even fighting the fight, really. And unless we drastically change our tactics, we will be defeated.
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