In the two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled Past Tense, Part 1 and Part 2, a transporter accident lands Commander Benjamin Sisko, Dr Julian Bashir, and Lt Commander Jadzia Dax in San Francisco, in the year 2024. From Wikipedia:
Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves.
Well, who would have thought that it would be so prescient!
Liberal City Builds Walls To Protect Elite, Clears Out Homeless
by Andrew Sanders | Tuesday, November 14, 2023
San Francisco has erected barricades and fencing to secure the APEC summit where President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet this week.
The decision to erect the temporary barricades has faced criticism on social media, with some arguing that the decision is deeply hypocritical for Democratic-run San Francisco.
“San Francisco’s homeless population was entirely cleared out for Xi Jinping,” End Wokeness’ account posted.
“The government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to.”
“U.S. taxpayers’ money is being used to protect the ‘safety’ of a communist dictator, suppressing the voices of the public living in America,” Jennifer Zeng wrote.
The White House announced that Biden would meet with Xi to discuss issues in the U.S.-PRC bilateral relationship and how the two countries can continue to responsibly manage competition, and work together.
Governor Gavin Newsom said, truthfully enough, “If you have people over at your house, you are gonna clean up the house.” But it begs the obvious question: why don’t you keep your house clean even when you are not expecting guests?
Kensington junkies
So, the City by the Bay was cleaned up, and the homeless and junkies and derelicts shoved aside, pushed out of sight, and ‘temporary barricades and fences’ have been set up to keep them from metastasizing back to where Xi Jinping could see them. About the only difference I can see behind the 2023 clean up and the 2024 ‘sanctuary districts’ from Deep Space Nine is that DS9 had the sanctuary district as a place with permanent walls.
Think about how the sanctuary district was defined, as “a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves.” Doesn’t that accurately described the crisis of homelessness, drug abuse, and vagrancy that is infesting what was once one of America’s most beautiful cities? Couldn’t we build something like that in Kensington?
A radical solution? Yeah, perhaps it is, but is it any more radical than letting the derelicts and junkies sleep on the streets and poop on the streets and shoot up on the streets? Perhaps it’s more noticeable in San Francisco, the beautiful city that attracted the hippies to the Summer of Love, and the tech industries in California, than in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, especially since everyone who can avoid Kensington does avoid Kensington. Downtown Frisco at least used to be prettier than living under the SEPTA El.
Let’s tell the truth here: the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, and SEPTA’s Allegheny Station, are the ‘sanctuary district’ envisioned in Deep Space Nine, but without the walls to keep the derelicts and junkies in, and decent people out. Incoming Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins ran on a tougher law enforcement platform, but she’s struggling to find ways to make that happen. As much as the left would squall about it, something similar to a sanctuary district, in which the derelicts would at least be sheltered and fed, makes sense, at least in a sort of dystopian way. Let’s tell another truth: a dystopian solution wouldn’t be something anyone would suggest if the policies of the Democrats who have run Philly, and San Francisco, and most of our major cities hadn’t failed so miserably.