After last month’s murders in The Jungle along I-5, various agencies and the police and fire departments studied the area around there and found it to be uninhabitable. This sort of pronouncement makes my neurons ache.
It is inhabited, my neurons say. So how can it be uninhabitable? If you demonstrate doing a thing, then in so doing you also demonstrate it is not impossible to do the thing.
Then I curl up in a ball on the ground and tremble from revulsion and loathing of the insect minds.
Speaking of proofs of possibilities, how about that guy in San Francisco who thinks well off educated entrepreneurs like him shouldn’t have to see homeless people in the streets, and he can prove it?
Justin Keller backed off his initial characterization of the unwanted poor people as riff raff, but apparently not out of any newfound sensitivity or understanding. Rather, he recoiled from the response he got to it.
Still, he has noted that “somehow” a great many of the homeless people vanished during the Super Bowl, and so he says, that proves that they can be got rid of.
“I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence,” he said, making me wonder if he’s spoofing us all.
Is it possible for anyone to be that clueless? I search my memory, thinking of all the people I have met in the last two thirds of a century, and ...
Oh Lord, it is possible isn’t it?
Yes, forcing people to disappear has been demonstrated repeatedly through history.
Some experts like Pol Pot and Pinochet and others have managed to force large numbers of people to disappear permanently and at surprisingly little expense.
No, it was not a coincidence. Homeless people always disappear during Super Bowls. I think the way it’s done is this: Figure you need them gone 24 hours. Twenty-four times three is 72. That’s how many miles away you want the ones you can’t jail.
So in the case of San Francisco, that means round them up the day before the game and truck them out near Fresno. Let them walk back. Easy peasy. There are some cities in the United States that practice this shuffle daily.
Last week, I suggested a better way. Build homes for the homeless and they will, by living in them, cease to be homeless anymore, thus magically eradicating homelessness by means of sheer logic.
We can even get the formerly homeless people off the streets by going the extra mile and equipping their homes with cable TV and stereos and refrigerators to keep taco ingredients and cold ones in. They will then disappear every Super Bowl by their own initiative to watch the game at home.
Maybe this is what Justin is trying to get the people of San Francisco to realize. Maybe he knows the decent “wealthy working people” of San Francisco won’t support housing for homeless people unless he gets them to appreciate first how badly they want them gone from sight. Riff raff and ragamuffins, away!
Extra credit essay challenge in advanced possibility theory:
It has been demonstrated that Seattle can raise its minimum wage and the economy can get better all at the same time. Therefore, it is not impossible that those of us who said so were actually right back when they said it.
For 20 bonus points and your name written on the blackboard until the weekend janitor erases it, express the idea of “neener, neener” in 100 or fewer words, without sounding overly gleeful or immature or sassy.
Chelsea Clinton touched on our general topic for this week when she said that, in connection with mass incarceration, Bernie Sanders didn’t know what was possible.
What she meant to say was that, unlike her, he didn’t know what was impossible. For 10 bonus points and your name forever hermetically sealed in a No. 2 jar of mayonnaise on Funk and Wagnall’s back porch, please explain in detail how Chelsea Clinton is such an expert on what can’t be done.