I do not, in anyway, consider Canada my home. Born there, but you can’t help where you were born. Lived in Edmonton in the recent past but got out of there after a year and a few months. I am actually homeless at the moment. Thankfully, because of retirement income and credit cards I am not on the street, instead a posh hotel (not with a Haram view but one that looks like I am in a jail).
This is a complicated, and obtuse, way of saying that I consider Marin County (sort of) my home because I lived there for fifty years. I lived in various cities constituting the county, and once owned land in the unincorporated area (West Marin).
Obtuse can mean slow to understand OR annoyingly insensitive. Take your pick.
I fled due to this simple fact: cruel and inhumane discrimination was heaped upon me after I became a Muslim woman. No longer have much contact with Marin folks. Why would I? Former friends and colleagues did nothing to defend nor comfort me.
Recently, reached out to a woman, we both worked for the County at the same time. She apparently does not read the blog as she was surprised to learn that I now reside in Saudi Arabia. My subject line: where I do not live.
You must remember this: Marin County is a super rich enclave, just north of San Francisco. It is lily white – its few minorities are in ghettos. Blacks in Marin City; Hispanics in the Canal Area, a poor and crowded portion of San Rafael.
Enclave is a a place or group that is different in character from those surrounding it
Therefore, it came of surprise to learn from my former colleague. :
“San Rafael is having quite a problem with the homeless issues. They are camping anywhere that is public land with the protection of the courts. It is getting pretty bad, I really think there has to be more control over this problem. They come from out of state because they hear about all the “freebee” Calif. is giving homeless. We should be helping those who are working and are low income, struggling to keep afloat instead. That’s my feeling anyway.”
Me: Thank you SO much for responding to my email and giving me all of the information about what is going on! I cannot believe the homeless problem!! It was horrible in Edmonton as well. They have taken over the entire of the downtown area in many ways making it most inhospitable and uninhabitable. I lived in an area where it was homeless free – near the Parliament buildings and had a part-time chauffeur that got me around to appointments without fear of them. I had no idea that had happened to prosperous San Rafael as well. It makes me so happy that I can remember it when it was in its glory days- as can you. We were both there then . So fortunate to have been there. How sad you must be to see it now. I am spared that. I do agree that in both the US and Canada support MUST be given to the working poor. Only they are deserving of governmental support. The working poor are the real victims and no one stands up for them or their rights in either country.
The conversation changed.
She: I’ll bet Saudi Arabia doesn’t tolerate any shenanigans of this sort. They won’t even let their women walk around without head coverings or show any skin. Hope you manage to survive in such a strict country that doesn’t consider women as equals. Take care.
Me: You are entirely misinformed about Saudi Arabia. Women are much freer here than in either the United States or Canada. Wearing head scarves is utterly optional. I do so when I am in the holy cities of Mecca or Medina but not in Riyadh necessarily. But it is easier to throw on a head scarf – then you do not have to worry about your hair and they are most decorative. An Instagram reel shows me in receipt of three beautiful scarves gifted by a Saudi man the fashioning of his scarf. I am not blaming you because I was misinformed about Saudi Arabia too – did not learn the truth until I first came here in December of 2022. Western media lies about so many things. It is shameful.
Saudi Arabia is most affluent. There are no homeless whatsoever. They are cared for by the government under the leadership of MBS (a truly great leader)
In am in Medina at the moment. I am wearing abayas, they are cooler to wear as they are loose fitting.I shall wear my Palestinian head scarf – actually bought in Edmonton. I am wearing it in support of the Palestinian people. MBS is working behind the scenes, trying to effect a cease fire. I pray it will happen.
I am planning to live in the capital city of Riyadh. It makes both Edmonton and San Rafael look like third world countries. It seems so strange to be doing all of this on money supplied by Marin County. Oh well I earned it. I hope you are healthy and hopeful. I feel absolutely blessed to be here at this time and at this place. Saudis are kind, generous and loving. They live in a well ordered society. The Quran is the constitution of the country.
After hearing about San Rafael, magically along came this article in the New Yorker,Nathan Heller’s October 16, 2023 What Happened to San Francisco, Really? It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask..
“In the past few years, accounts of San Francisco’s unravelling—less like a tired sweater than a ball of yarn caught in a boat propeller—have spread with the authority of gossip or folklore. As the pandemic recedes, nearly a quarter of offices downtown are said to be vacant, the worst rate in the nation. Drug-overdose deaths are surging; reports of theft on downtown streets, including an almost two-hundred-per-cent increase in car break-ins in 2021, have crossed the national media to censorious response. “They took down the guardrails around personal responsibility,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger declared on Fox News……Nine years ago, when HBO premièred the series “Silicon Valley,” a deadpan comedy lampooning the Bay Area’s life-style blandishments and hapless global power, the city seemed to exist in a helium balloon, floating ever upward. Now the same place is viewed as an emblem of American collapse.”
Crime has spiraled.
“One major actual issue at play in town right now is public safety. As downtown emptied out with the lockdown—“not a single fucking person on our streets!” another supervisor told me—certain genres of crime flourished. Smash-and-grab operations, in which car windows are shattered and valuable goods are extracted in seconds, usually alongside a running getaway vehicle, had been the bane of parked cars in San Francisco for several years. During the pandemic, the same practice was used to rob storefronts, spiking property-crime levels to forty-one per cent above the national average. Meanwhile, fentanyl, cheap and lethal, exploded in street sales. According to an eighteen-month investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, that surge was tied to well-run Honduran cartels, some of which sold meals to dealers out of car trunks so that they didn’t have to leave their posts. (In the spring, Representative Nancy Pelosi, whose district encompasses most of the city, requested special funds from the Justice Department to investigate; no major federal arrests have yet been made.)”
Read this, I was absolutely shocked at the amount of money spent on the homeless situation, to no avail whatsoever.
“The pandemic and fentanyl collided,” Lydia Bransten, the executive director of the Gubbio Project, which offers coffee, health services, and a safe place to nap to a hundred homeless people a day, told me. Congregate shelters were at severely reduced capacity. “People in the throes of addiction were hanging out with other people in the throes of addiction without the rest of the community. Then the city reopened, and housed people coming out of their homes were confronted with this scene of absolute devastation. And they’re flabbergasted: ‘How could this happen? We’ve spent all this money!’ ” From 2021 to 2022, San Francisco spent seventy-six million dollars on drug-treatment programs; its homelessness budget was nearly seven hundred million dollars. (New York City’s was $1.4 billion, for about ten times the urban population.) From Bransten’s perspective, the lockdown was an experience of absolute damage control, with winnowed ranks of care workers, like her, scrambling to protect a poor and unhoused population from the worst of a deadly pandemic. But after living through their own pandemic challenges, people had what Bransten calls “compassion fatigue.”
Crime is rampant, a huge shortage of police officers, interesting to read what Dorsey says about the situation, it is rather amusing.
“We have an understaffed police department,” Matt Dorsey, the supervisor for the South of Market section of downtown, said, citing a shortfall of seven hundred officers. Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson, had the idea of adding fentanyl dealing to a list of crimes for which undocumented immigrants lose their sanctuary-city protections. “My hope was to incentivize a change to the drug market—if we went back to the good old days of heroin and Oxys, we’ll save hundreds of lives every year,” he said. “It didn’t go over well with my colleagues.”
The mayor, Kathleen Breed, was interviewed. I lived under her power for nine months during the beginning days of covid. I was NOT impressed. It was living hell, as overly strict lockdown was imposed, then lessened – cyclically. No-one seems impressed with her these days..
“Breed’s approval ratings by some counts once hovered in the fifties, but, with anxiety about downtown growing, two-thirds of San Franciscans now disapprove of her, according to a recent poll. But she has hope.”
“We’re changing what this historic building—with the best bathrooms in the city—is going to be,” she enthused.
Great! The best bathrooms in the city, fabulous I can see the advertisements: San Francisco: The Best Place to Defecate.
Defecate means discharge feces from the body. It has the funniest synonyms – some humor is needed at this moment: do number two, do a pooh, do a whoopsie, have a dump. Go ahead, laugh! I dare you!
Breed’s future challenger had this to say about her ‘style”
“Breed’s critics say that proposing interesting ideas is not the same as executing them. “This mayor is not a collaborative mayor—she grew accustomed to issuing executive orders during covid,” Ahsha Safaí, a supervisor who has filed to run against Breed next year, told me at a sidewalk table recently. “
Her covid orders were ridiculous. I was blogging at the time, absolutely outspoken in my criticism of her. She had about as much understanding of science as Premier Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta – my last and final stop before coming to live under the auspices of MBS.
Heller’s article is, in my opinion, too long. Guess he gets paid by the word. Hahaha. I don’t, so soon I shall say Bye Bye!
One problem with retirement: you never know what day it is. Realized with surprise yesterday that today,, October 20, 2023 is my third anniversary, of my reversion to the Islamic Faith. Not sure exactly how I shall spend the day – quietly in worship, feeling incredibly blessed to be here, at this time, at this place. Even more blessed when I read about what I left behind, what I escaped from.
All praise to Allah (SWT). Subhanallah.
The reel reveals Grandson (NIG) serving me breakfast, a sandwich fashioned from his hands. As anyone can see I have SO much to be grateful for!!! Subhanallah!
