California, America's largest and most populous state, has always prided itself as being the bellweather of change and innovation for Americans.
Who hasn't heard of Silicon Valley and the chip revolution? Over here, cutting-edge technology and the innovators of new-tech, high-tech, from Google to Apple, Facebook to H-P, Intel to Yahoo, Cisco to Oracle, and now green tech give this great state the edge in innovation and creativity and seeming progress.
That's one side of the story. Underneath this veneer of seeming chi-chi culture is a deepening cesspool of civic unraveling and the moral breakdowns splintering families and the social fabric which glue civil society together.
For one, the California state government is not only broke; it is dysfunctional; and it is utterly corrupt. It can't curb its fiscal profligacy and addiction to wasteful spending and looting. Led by a Grade-B action hero-actor, Arnold Schwazenegger, known more for his PR glad-handing, back-slapping, and pep talk, than for substance, the state government is careening from one crisis to another, without any long-term solution to fix what is fundamentally California's core problems, i.e. profligate spending without knowing where the money is coming from... rampant looting, featherbedding and "creative" government accounting.
As ordinary Americans reel from the wallop of a financial meltdown, scandalized by rampant corporate looting at the top, with joblessness on the rise, houses turned upside-down, bank repos and foreclosures increasingly wracking the state of California..... displacing homeowners who no longer could afford the roof over their heads, there is an "armpit" side to this once great state which is not being reported by the mainstream American news media.
Apart from the fiscal mess hurling California into the abyss of a complete fiscal meltdown, with the state budget running amuck, with no viable means to pay for its runaway government bloated with bureaucracy and a leeching public clamoring for more social services with no way to pay for them, there is at the bottom of this mess a social-civic unraveling which is not being reported in the non-West.
A society's social-spiritual health is oftentimes not measured by the numerics and statistics calibrated in $$$ terms.
It is in the state of its civil culture, the quality of its schools, its library facilities, and the overall quality of life which permeates its urban and exurban centers. And furthermore, in the state of its youth and how afflicted they are with drugs and alcohol abuse.
Here in San Francisco, the steady decline in the city's social civic fabric is reflected and poignantly displayed by the breakdowns of its Main San Francisco Public Library. It is a hub for the homeless bums.... street people who are either on drugs, on alcohol, or mentally insane.
Each day, the numbers of homeless people in San Francisco wallow in the mean streets of this # 1 Conde Nast tourist destination are pegged by the thousands.... aggressively pandhandling, defecating in the streets, harrassing tourists for pocket change, or otherwise high on drugs, heroin, or other addictives.
Granted it is not equivalent to the Slumdogs of Mumbai; but here in San Francisco, one of America's most affluent and cutting-edge city, San Francisco is a shocking reminder of the pitfalls of unbriddled greed... of a society crumbling from drug abuse and alcoholism.
Worse, it is causing our neighbors in the South, i.e. Mexico, enormous grief because the insatiable demand for drugs, heroin, cocaine, by Americans feed on the supply being pumped up from south of the border.
Alcoholism in America is rampant, as is drug addiction; and there do not appear to be any solution in sight. Most of these homeless vagrants are young but unemployable or otherwise mentally deranged; and they are simply allowed to fall through the cracks in a society vapid of any moral compass nor social responsibility anymore.
That's America. Home of the free... freedom to snort cocaine, do drugs, smoke pot, and get drunk. No holds barred.
What San Francisco and its public library is supposed to be the center of intellect, the citadel and repository of its books, where its citizenry can devote some quiet time to read, to explore, to unwind from the work treadmill, and to keep up with the knowledge and whet their curiosity for the things around the rest of the world, for history, for fiction or non-fictional exploration, for the food of the mind, has increasingly become a hub for the drunks, the derelicts, the street vermin, the drug addicts, and the street bums. They have taken over.
The Civic Center where San Francisco's Main Library is located is a microcosm of what San Francisco has become.... kook city, loony town......drug-infested, full of street vermin, crazies, bums, drug addicts, and street panhandlers.
The homeless has increasingly taken over and used the Main Library as its public toilet and sleeping berth. It has become so filthy and yes... also unsafe that many people shun it and avoid even going in.
The link below reports on what and how San Francisco and its uber-liberals are trying to cope with this social cancer called "homelessness," otherwise also known as proliferation of drug addiction and endemic alcohol abuse and alcoholism.
The gweillos are in denial that there is a malignant cancer spreading in their sick society. Click on:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Library-helping-homeless-patrons-42719032.html
And here they are blaming China for causing havoc in its deteriorating society in America by flooding the U.S. with "Made in China" goods.
Incidentally, do Americans still produce anything anymore ?
Without yellow and brown people, doing the brawn and brain work.... guess where the gweillos will be and how will they cope ?
In a little over a week, the perversity of April 20 will again bring out the druggies hooked on Marijuana. The annual bong parties with cannabis marijuana users openly smoking dope in campuses like UC Santa Cruz or the University of Colorado in Denver are emblematic of a society hooked on drugs and dope.
China went through the mess with opium; and it broke Chinese society unleashing Western imperialism with its virulence and rapacity to which today the Chinese still remember.
Worth pondering, folks. Isn't this "deja vu"?
