Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   11/26/2019

Fail to enforce minimum standards and…

What you get, what you invite, is the lowest common denominator: no standards. I can’t believe that homeless transients can’t legally be told to adhere to community standards of living and behavior. Such legalities apparently now mandate that a formerly self-ruling entity of city and county governance, under the U.S. Constitution, must allow unregulated outdoor camping and its ancillary drug and other unhealthy practices—unless we build their housing. Misdemeanors and felonies? Fuhgetaboutit.

Is this what some occupying, domineering foreign government, like that long-ago British despot, or even our overlords in Washington, DC, have imposed? Have black-robed mini-tyrants-in-their-own-minds pronounced their verdict upon people once free to govern their own affairs? What verdict mandates no penalties for, let alone regulation of, those taking public/private spaces for their own formerly disallowed camping and open refuse-dumping? Is it just a “California thing”?

It appears to be a losing legal or even political argument, that we can simply say to the bums, transients, criminals, druggies and mentally-unstable: No! You’re not allowed to occupy sidewalks, parking lots, entryways or untended private property. Not on the collective limited resources of our struggling citizens. And certainly not as an obligation-free lifestyle, a dodge around what was once expected of able-bodied adults—acquire gainful employment and provide for your own needs.

Adages apply themselves: Taking from Peter to pay Paul will never find Paul complaining. Providing fish feeds one for a day; taught to fish, one feeds for a lifetime. Charity begins at home and, by extension, for our own residents who, if they fall on hard times, will find local fellow citizens willing to help a neighbor. Disasters have proven that over and over.

Are the generous-with-other-people’s-money going to tell the rest of us that anyone hopping off the freeway or rail car are our collective burden? Will such people open their spare space and personally care for those who, in many cases, simply refuse to provide for themselves as a lifestyle choice?

Will another cent of sales tax on the productive, often poor, people of Tehama County be the last request to fund said lifestyles? However, that tax increase will most likely be spent on previously promised public employee retirement and health benefits, the generosity of which exceeds much of the private sector. That’s another “kettle of fish,” I guess.

That would sum up what I might have said last Thursday at the homeless facility meeting; a lot of open-ended questions, admittedly. One suggestion by radio talker Lars Larson—who has seen homeless situations in Oregon and Washington and all manner of attempts at “dealing” with them—is a demand on those preying upon our spaces, resources and hearts:

Any homeless people that are encountered by authorities, camping or otherwise occupying public spaces, must be identified in order to be in our midst. That translates to providing “the man” with documents proving verifiable identity, certainly if they are going to be housed and/or fed at public expense. Law enforcement at all levels has access to databases and facial recognition tools to ensure that no one can anonymously move among us and remain unidentified.

Some will insist that that is an “undue burden,” an illegal imposition and requirement. They should be thanked for their input and roundly ignored; however, the rest of us are owed at the very least the courtesy, even duty, of letting the community know who these people are, their backgrounds, criminal records and drug abuse histories. Most are ok; verified ID must take place; bad ones must be known.

If that is too much to ask of anyone, even those living in vehicles or RVs, well, too bad. People can move along if they think that, in addition to asking the rest of us to tolerate their unproductive, panhandling presence, they wish to do so without providing us proof of identity. I’m serious about this because I care first about fellow residents doing their best to live and provide for themselves, obey the laws, stay clean and sober and practice kindness to each other. Transients, if the law now mandates that we provide for sleeping space, have no legal or moral right to use public resources, without ID.

Many thought it oddly calculating for the Clintons to use polling to choose vacation venues; now we see polling over the most disruptive and impactful process in the Constitution—impeachment of the president, which effectively negates the last election and deprives voters of their chosen candidate next year. It's true that the DCCC conducted focus group testing of impeachment messages to find that “bribery” was the most compelling way to describe what Trump did. They haven’t found actual bribery, just called it so.

We can now conclude that, beyond focus-group tested labels, Democrats simply want to define Trump being president as a high crime and misdemeanor. How else to describe their obsession with casting any ordinary, executive action defined in Article II of the Constitution, routinely performed by presidents past, as now somehow malevolent, abusive and impeachable.

Obama blithely fired every political appointee carried over from President Bush, every attorney he could and Dems shrugged; Obama fired all of Bush’s ambassadors, even let one die in Benghazi, while Dems defended him. Obama fired Inspectors General, attacked whistleblowers, and granted clemency to terrorists and traitors; his supporters cheered.

Trump fires FBI head Comey, fires a few holdovers, recalls an Obama ambassador, fires no IGs and simply calls for the whistleblower-who-isn’t-a-whistleblower to come forward with his testimony—Dems say he’s shredding the Constitution and deserves to be jailed. And he shouldn’t pardon anyone.

“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war of Resistance against this administration, it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” said AG Bill Barr.