One of the biggest reasons California feels broken is the unmistakable explosion in the homeless population. It is breathtaking. Everywhere I have been west of the Sierra, in any town or city above the smallest size burg, feels as if it is overrun by the homeless.
One need only walk down the street almost anywhere to see this. It's not just big cities. In Rohnert Park, a small college town, a quick peek over the fence by my motel revealed two homeless camps in plain view.
In Eureka, the ubiquity of the homeless was reflected in the fact that every single business downtown, and I mean every one, had a sign stating something along the lines of "No public restrooms. NO EXCEPTIONS!"
In Redding, an otherwise charming little city, just walking the few blocks between my motel and the Der Weinerschnitzel where I ate that evening, I passed half a dozen people with dirty backpacks and sleeping rolls, looking like troopers in a vagrant army.
Where I am right now in Ventura, which is a nice city on the coast, anytime I walk down the street I encounter a homeless person.
One can spot them far off by the way they walk---unmistakably slow and shuffling, uncannily like the zombies in so many of the television shows and movies of late.
In the Eighties when I first came to Berkeley, one could see homeless people on the streets. It felt like a novelty. Back then "helping the homeless" was one of those feel-good liberal things that college kids liked to talk about, alongside "no nukes" and "divest from apartheid." Everyone seems to blame the Reagan Administration for shutting down the mental hospitals. I still here people using this excuse, amazingly.
But where one might have seen a few homeless in large cities back then, one now sees dozens and hundreds. In Fresno, a medium-sized city, they outnumber the non-homeless on the sidewalks in many parts of town, it seems.
In Fresno, moreover, I was panhandled aggressively inside a fast-food restaurant. This also happened to a friend there, as he was standing in line. The employees don't seem to care, but then again, they don't seem to care about anything. A lot of them don't even speak English very well.
In Bakersfield, where I was staying a couple weeks ago, I could look out from my motel at the McDonalds across the street and invariably see a homeless person stationed right at the side entrance door, panhandling everyone who walked in or out from the parking lot.
I once watched as one homeless person walked around to check out the spot, and then shuffled off when he saw that someone was already there with a sign soliciting money. In downtown there I got solicited within five seconds of parking my car. A guy just came up and tapped on my window while the engine was barely off. He seemed to sense my reluctance, and insisted he only wanted food, not money, so I happily unloaded some of the excess Del Monte fruit cups I had left over from Burning Man.
Mind you this was not in a bad neighborhood, but in a cluster of motels and restaurants right off Highway 99, a block from a Barnes and Noble. Homeless people are just now part of the ubiquitous scenery.
Berkeley is a good example for how things have changed. Back in 1984, Berkeley's downtown, only a few blocks off campus, was rather scummy and dirty. Now like most downtowns of college towns, it is spruced up and very nice, as I learned thanks to my friend David, who took me there on a day when the streets were blocked off for a huge street festival.
But there are most homeless than in 1984, unmistakably so. That's California, as I've observed. More beautiful on the surface, but more ugly underneath.
I try to concentrate on the beauty most of the time.
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