During my day trip into San Francisco two Sundays ago, my biggest impression of the city was how deserted it felt. There were fewer people, of every type of person. That meant fewer people on the BART and on its platforms. Fewer people in the soccer fields on the campus of San Francisco State. Fewer people on the beach. Fewer people bus. Fewer people watching a transvestite lip-synch dancing to "Holding Out for a Hero" in the traffic median of Market Street in the Castro.
Fewer people on the tour of the Mission Dolores---few enough that I could recite the entire Rosary in Latin kneeling in the front pew without interruption, praying for the people of the City.
While there, I thought about, and prayed for, my friends David and Elisabeth, who live in Oakland. I've known David for forty years since high school and love him like a brother. We have spent many days together in this metropolis, and it is thanks to that fellowship that I have come to know the city in large part. They had brought me to the Mission during a tour they arranged for me in 2012, to see the city through their eyes. It was delightful. They would not come in the Mission chapel itself, perhaps because they are atheists and the religious iconography is repulsive to them. I had thought about contacting them, at least perhaps to see David over lunch, but I have no doubt what his social media feed is like lately, and what he thinks of Trump supporters. I knew it would strain charity to force a meeting right now, and I preferred to let that happen at some later date, when we can do more than deliver rebukes to each other. I hope that happens someday.
In the courtyard of the Mission, I used my iPhone to take a picture of the 1970s-era modernist mosaic, which has in a collage of the history of the mission, made decades ago when standards of historical depiction were more generous to the early Spanish without condemnation of all things brought by Europeans. A group of wide-eyed mosaic cattle were, I concluded, related to the ones that Juan Anza had left behind in 1776 at the Guevavi Ranch in southern Arizona (where we had stayed on my birthday in October) as it would have been Anza who brought these first cattle to the Mission.
The little graveyard at the end of the Mission tour was, in contrast to the rest of the tour, mildly crowded with groups of Spanish-speaking foreigners examining the names. In the gift shop I bought a new set of Rosary beads, and some post cards. I had wanted to walk through the entire city without having to purchase anything in the way of food and drink. This was an optional purchase and I was glad for it on reflection, as my existing set of beads had recently broken.
From the Mission, I cut back up the hill the short distance to Market Street, passing a young Asian gay couple, wispy thin, looking like identical gay twins, as many young gay couples make themselves to be, right down to their masks. They were pushing a stroller with a tiny dog inside of it. A peaceful Sunday stroll to the park, perhaps. Everything felt normal in a way---just a lot fewer people.
From there I walked all the way down the hill of Market Street to the plaza City Hall, where the street flattens out into downtown. There were fewer homeless lying on the street, and fewer panhandlers. Everything felt a quiet, scaled-down version of the city as it had been. On the beach, many people outdoors were not wearing masks, but downhill from the Castro to downtown everyone wore a mask outside except the homeless and me.
On the marquee of the theater complex across the street from City Hall., the Bill Graham Auditorium, a quote from "President-Elect Biden" was displayed in large black letters, in place of whatever show announcement would have been there in normal times. The doors were closed and curtains were in across all the windows. It looked as if months had passed with the only thing happening being the marquee sign.
All was subdued and deserted, especially on a Sunday. Only a few people shuffling int he plaza, and yours truly hoofing it to make sure I got back with daylight to spare.. Around City Hall were newspaper boxes, and the most prominent ones were for the Epoch Times, with a friendly story about Donald Trump on the cover. It was the same issue that the Chinese woman in Sacramento had handed me, at the Trump rally in front of the Capitol. The emptiness of the plaza, and the shuttered public facilities, felt post-Apocalyptic haunted, even in broad daylight.
Blocks later I passed the little triangular plaza in front of the hotel where J andI had stayed during our visit in 2014 (where the building swayed that night like a needle from an earthquake in the ocean). The plaza was trashier, but the population decrease meant it was about as tolerable as before. Noticeably absent, everywhere from my previous visit, was the pungent smell of marijuana smoke on the sidewalk, coming from some vaguely identifiable source nearby. There were simply too few people on the sidewalk to create any such carpeting cloud of smellable emissions of any kind. It felt refreshing.
Finally at Montgomery Street, I decided it was time to hop on the BART and make my way back towards Pleasanton, where my hotel room awaited him, just a few blocks from the station. I took one last good look at the city in the golden sunlight of late afternoon. I still had time, if I had wanted, to walk all the way down to the Embarcadero Station.
But I know the kind of people who get on and off the train at that stop. They are the ones who work in the tall shiny skyscrapers in lower downtown near the water---or at least they would be working there under normal times, instead of Zooming from their homes out on the BART line. I know someone who is employed there in a very powerful firm that is well known and manifestly on the side of evil. Thus I figured I could do without seeing that little quarter of the City on that day.
As I rode on the BART back to the suburbs, I reflected that I walked all around the city and had seen almost no evidence that a major national election had just passed with supposedly the liberal guy having won the Presidency from the most hated man on earth. Outside of the healing quote from "President-Elect" on the auditorium, I had seen one lingering sign for Biden, in a window with other signs for local races, probably indicative that a Democratic party activist lived there.
Besides that, I see a few murals and signs that were ostensibly from rainbow flag folks, stating obliquely that "now we no longer have to live in fear of our lives" (from Trump and his supporters like me). I thought of the mental disease that it takes to believe such a thing and realized there was nothing to do to reach such people.
To me, this sentiment is actual aggression against me. It is the epitome of passive-aggressive aggression, to be specific. It is a statement that "my enemies are so dangerous to me that they need to be silenced or countered with violence to stop them." It is the ultimate Communist switcheroo fantasy that allows them to be brutal thugs against whomever they want. My declared victimhood requires me to destroy you. They want to use their phony victimhood to destroy everything they hate. So hen I see mural and signs like that, I know they were made by bullies.
At the end of the day's little journey, my impression of everything I had seen, put in perspective of what I know about the city, was that it was the sad, tired end of a long era of Progressive domination of politics. The life force has run out of it. It is coming undone. The city is heading into a low ebb. Its politics is receding, not growing. It will be an island in the new America after exposure of this crime, and the breaking of the left. It will a sad place, with a fraction of the vibrancy it had. It will come back, but it will not be what it was for a long time, partly because people want it that way. I think the ones that are left prefer it the way it is. They want the rest of the country to stay in a lockdown prison so that the city can be theirs, and theirs alone, as it is right now.
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