Unwanted Out-of-Towners

I am concerned about the hundreds of out-of-towners coming into our city, San Francisco, with violence on their minds. They are coming into our city in response to the war on Iraq. They are costing our city as much as a million dollars a day, taking from already-depleted funds for education, healthcare, and other critical needs. They are recruiting others like themselves from around the state.

They aren't from San Francisco and they don't understand or share the spirit of San Francisco. Yet here they are, imposing their will and their values on our people.

Yes, I'm talking about what we call the SFPD. The San Francisco Police Department. How many of San Francisco's police are San Franciscans? Very, very few.

It's another serious consequence of our lack of affordable housing, of the gentrification of this city, of having driven away our working classes. It's another serious consequence of a world where responsible citizenship has been delegated to others, where money increasingly rules the day, so that hired mercenaries from elsewhere limit our freedoms with the baton.

What does it mean if, when crisis arises and freedom really matters, we find our actions, speech and movement controlled by people who don’t live in our same city, don’t participate in shaping our city’s policies, don’t share our same conversations, don’t have kids in our same schools, don’t know us as friends and neighbors?

How can we San Franciscans become our own peacekeepers and assure ourselves of ample spaces for the exercise of freedom?

As a first step, I call on all protest participants and organizers self-consciously to take on peacekeeping responsibilities themselves: let’s spread a spirit of non-violence, peace and courtesy, and make it known that that's what we're about. At the least we can show that we do not need to be ruled from outside.