Cloning Unicorns

... is what we're going to need to do if we're to deal with the drug addict / homeless / fatherless / illiterate / what-have-you populations. Willie Brown is worried about San Fran. He's afraid private citizens might take steps to protect themselves from violent street people. Worse yet, they might do more than hire girls to hop up and down while trying to push a door open. That would be a tragedy.

Whether it’s someone half out of his mind on meth or a mentally ill person throwing things around in a store or going off in a Starbucks, it’s just a matter of time before someone gets seriously hurt — and it could be the one who’s acting out.

The recent North Beach incident in which a truffle store owner’s son came to his defense with a baseball bat after the father scuffled with a man he said was causing a disturbance could easily have ended in tragedy.

Note that for Willie, the fear is that the perp will get hurt. Plenty of law-abiding citizens get hurt every day, whether that's property damage or physical assaults. If they counted, he'd say that "tragedies" have been going on for a long, long time. He doesn't. You don't matter. You're probably full of hate or you blame victims or something like that.

Willie has a solution. Well, a raft of solutions, really.

(The episode with the two chicks getting thumped by the crazy, homeless dude) went viral because it was on video and because another judge, Christine Van Aken, initially put Vincent on supervised release. But the real story is that incidents like this happen all the time — they just aren’t taped and fed to the evening news.

I’ve had conversations in several neighborhoods, and it’s clear there’s a growing desire to do something about the problems on our streets.

It has to be specialized: A poverty-stricken family needs to be handled differently than people with mental issues. People with mental issues need to be handled differently than drug addicts.

For some people, help may mean a locked mental health facility. For the more volatile cases, we may need to keep people in jail while providing mental health services.

It might "have to be" specialized, but it's not going to be specialized because there is neither the money nor the expertise in the quantities necessary. It's no different than magnitude of the problem of the illiterate kids in Baltimore.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Getting back to San Francisco, they have more drug addicts on their streets than they do high school students. The size of the problem overwhelms the ability to "specialize" solutions.

The reason we have jails is that they are a cheap way to get dangerous people out of circulation. Yes, treatment is better, but where are you going to find the trained specialists to work on the problem? How are you going to pay them? The math doesn't work.

Willie's solutions are just so much bong smoke. His prog readers read his essays at Starbucks and nod their heads while sipping their soy lattes and feel like they can fix this problem while maintaining their compassion credentials.

They can't.