Greasy Haired, Two-Legged Ruin
Way up near the northern end of the state, Eureka, California looks like this on the map:
I’m trying to imagine how you could give a place a better head start. It’s in the redwood zone, sitting on a sheltered bay just off the ocean. If you look at it from a distance, driving out on that peninsula that shelters the city, it looks magnificent. And it’s not far from the prettiest small town in the country, so there’s reason for hope. But then you get there.
Downtown is dirty and dead on Saturday evening. There are drug zombies everywhere. At the moment of the last county point-in-time count, a city with a population of about 27,000 had 653 homeless people, though the police department publishes its own count with lower numbers. A January point-in-time count tends to undercount the population that will be homeless throughout the year, so my bet would be that 653 is a little on the low side.
You can see half an hour of homeless drug zombies in Eureka here, if that sounds appealing:
There are dense knots of drug zombies, and significant numbers of street deaths every year (some of which you can find here, among other reported overdose deaths in Humboldt County). None of this is new, and Eureka has been struggling for years. But it doesn’t get better. There’s no danger that California is preparing to emerge from any of this.
So San Diego:
Los Angeles:
Oakland:
Redding:
And so on. And then, 650 miles north of Los Angeles, in the small coastal towns set among the redwoods, more of the same.
The decline of social trust and social standards turns everything to shit. At the beaches on the nearby Samoa Peninsula, today, the trash cans had all been opened and dumped by somebody who felt like digging through the garbage:
Naturally a paradise, culturally and socially a shithole. Darkly amusing adjacent suggestions from Google if you look for basic information on the place:
Yes, Eureka is very run down, full of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction. It is full of Democrats, who outnumber Republicans by two to one.
A certain functionally retarded sociopath keeps bragging about the brilliance and magnificence of California, the state that’s standing up to ORANGE MAN, and yes, his press office really did add a crown to the idiot’s avatar:
They’re bragging about the thing they’re destroying. Everything in this naturally magnificent state is locked into hard, ugly, persistent decline. There’s great beauty in California. It exists despite the people who govern it. To repeat a recent theme, I went traveling in California this week because I was hoping to renew my sense of hope. It didn’t work. Paradise, willfully destroyed.
'functionally retarded'
He can't read. I don't mean slowly or poorly. He can't read period.
He hires aides to read to him.
But he looks good in a suit and has a nice head of hair.
I grew up in Eureka. It was a great place to be a teen in the late ‘80s, and the high school was exceptional. Now my visits are fewer and farther between because it’s just too depressing to witness the continued decline.