When I was a lad, my family moved from Alexandria, Virginia (my dad was in the USAF stationed at the Pentagon) to Southern California (my dad went to work for Lockheed), and thence to Portola Valley on the peninsula below San Francisco (my dad went to work in the Northern branch of Kelly Johnson's "Skunk works") and it was there -- during my formative years -- I grew through adolescence and high school graduation in 1964. Consequently, I had a reverence and a love for San Francisco as we would often go into "the city" and enjoy what it had to offer. To be sure, I became a Giants fan when they moved out from New York in '58 and also a fan of the then-hapless 49ers.
But over the past six years, a great disaffection has set in. No longer is San Francisco a desirable place to visit and, while it only come to earn its new name -- San Franfescesco -- the signs of erosion began appearing to me on visits much earlier.
To be sure, there weren't the needles and turd piles of current note but I felt it was a high-priced tourist trap rip-off where restaurants over-crowded, over-charged and under-delivered. There was a vibrant population of Haight-Ashbury druggies and hippie scum who never got the message that The Dead were dying off and that the Summer of Love had turned into a grey Winter of Discontent.
Signs on bulletin boards saying things like "Demonstration in GG Park, Thursday at 12 Noon" had me asking why there was no cause enunciated; that they were only interested in having more or less warm bodies of disaffected souls show up and scream their anger in opposition to..what exactly?
On visits, I would squire those I was showing the sights of the city to on the obligatory endeavors like the cable car rides -- also obscenely over-priced and over-crowded -- where one would wait 45 minutes to board at Fisherman's Wharf to ride to Market Street and wait another 45 minutes for the return ride. All the while on both ends, you would be set upon by beggars and pan handlers of a stridently aggressive nature - sometimes uttering foul, impolite oaths if you refused them. It was almost as though they felt entitled to a portion of your wallet's contents.
But to be sure, these knights of the streets seek to give back to the city as only they know how.
Seems the bloom is off the rose and the only things now sprouting in the streets of San Francisco were turd blossoms. As evidenced by the video above, these don't seem to be confined to the streets alone.
I now have sworn that I will never "go home" again, to never lend my tourist money to the coffers of the city whose politicians mis-apply and mis-spend. In fact, I am so intent on embargoing the city, I wonder if it is possible to circumnavigate it when traveling to more Northern destinations. I shall consult my maps.
So, in an effort to stem any other tourism to that den of depravity, that congress of corn-holers, herewith is a tweet of possible interest.
— Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) December 28, 2019
So, party on Tony Bennett. You may have left your heart in San Francisco, but I have left San Francisco..period.
