Guest view: Utopian dreams

At least one conclusion can be drawn from Governor Gavin Newsom’s survival of last year’s recall attempt: proof the state’s voters can’t figure out why California has the highest taxes in the country, and on track to even greater heights since we must pay for the Governor’s non-stop utopian dreams.

Newsom has tapped former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs’ to be the current genie in making those dreams come true by enactment of the new EPIC project (“End Poverty in California”), euphemistically called “nonprofit”. We are told poverty will be ended if just a little more tax money is shared with the poor, if savings accounts (“baby bonds”) for low-income children are established, and if “certain offenses”, like public camping, loitering, and disorderly conduct, are decriminalized.

This EPIC project, which encourages public camping, brought to mind a letter to the City of Lodi, written by a friend fed up with the trashing of our state by the undisciplined and anti-social. His concern was the SR-99/Turner Road off-ramp, but it could just as well be anywhere in this once beautiful state. For the normal citizen, it’s impossible to understand the logic of how decriminalizing public camping, loitering, and disorderly conduct will improve anything anywhere. However, funny ideas should come as no surprise from a government which believes it can singularly change the world’s climate by diverting millions of tax dollars toward that end, but can’t even deal with lost souls staggering around freeway off-ramps.

Decriminalizing criminal behavior will not improve the homeless situation. This is simply capitulation by politicians who don’t have the sense to identify the problem, nor the will to do anything about it. Former Mayor Tubbs, if you recall, is no longer mayor because he proposed to turn Swenson Golf Course into Section 8 low-income housing. Tubbs’ was tone-deaf to community priorities because his socialist ideas (i.e., “basic income”, for one) don’t mesh with an American mindset. However, to prove that with proper nourishment bad ideas will always blossom, Tubbs was promoted to the Governor’s office where his thinking now finds fertile ground.

Voters upset about the homeless situation are merely reacting to a circumstance that shouldn’t exist in a civilized society and frustrated that absolutely nothing is being done to correct it. The EPIC tactic of decriminalization will make it far worse, primarily because the geniuses who concocted this scheme haven’t taken the time to identify who those “campers” are, nor recognize why they choose to be outside: because they reject societal rules. Until politicos figure out exactly WHO it is they’re trying to help, nothing will be solved.

If we believe what homeless advocates tell us, those “campers” just happen to be between jobs, “down on their luck”, suffer from low wages, can’t afford the housing, and so on. This is demonstrably untrue, since most studies point out that dysfunctional family life, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness are key components keeping such individuals on the fringe. People who are “down on their luck” or quit their jobs because of low wages don’t steal shopping carts and bicycles and move to freeway off-ramps.

When the light eventually comes on for our government overlords and they figure out the population they’re dealing with, new solutions will surface. One so-called “solution” recently approved by the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors, would house the homeless in vacant motels. Now, packing a slew of dysfunctional people in one place is not a solution, it’s merely concentrating the problem… Pretending it’s a solution is insulting. However, one thing is transparently true: society should not tolerate a ragtag assembly of non-fitters who not only trash the environment, but burn buildings, steal from local business, harm innocent people, and prowl neighborhoods.

What then should be done? Four steps:

• Start by scrapping the EPIC project, which simply creates two categories of citizens: one, which must observe every law, but has to fund the activities of a dependent second category, which observes few laws and has no responsibilities.

• Reverse the Lanterman-Petris Act Gov. Reagan signed in 1967, which ended the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will.

• Using the billions now spent on the homeless problem, repurpose some of the many vacant state properties and convert them to mental facilities, shelters, drug rehab, and job training centers.

• Evaluate the “campers” and assign them their proper place: some to their families, some to jail, some to rehabilitation, and some institutionalized. This simple prescription might be the start of California becoming normal again.

John B. Hymes is a retired Stockton fire battalion chief and past Civil Service commissioner.

This article originally appeared on The Record: Homelessness cannot be solved by unrealistic ideas