Things San Franciscans Like: Freedom And Not Freedom

I started to enjoy this poking fun, until I reached your punchline. It is a matter of opinion whether God likes gays as much as I do, but it is a matter of fact that we are running out of space to store all the spent lube tubes. Waste reduction has been an opt-in activity for decades, and too few of us have joined the movement to make it work, so someone has to push the issue or we're all going to be buried in our own rubbish. We already have a garbage island bigger than Texas floating in the Pacific. Can we really afford to laugh and proclaim that future generations will have to peel our table scraps from our cold, sarcastic fingers?

Oh - and BTW: The compost is sent to the farms that raise the food that creates the waste that makes the compost that fertilizes the crops that... THAT'S some circular thinking I can get into.

As usual with SFAppeal articles, I don't know whether to laugh or barf. This is a pretty apt description of transient yuppies who live in the Mission, Inner Sunset, Noe, etc. and of the prevailing desired opinion among the political establishment. That is to say it's an affirmation of their prevailing values of ideology as self-affirmation. The problem is that most people in the City really don't think that way, or if they did once, they grew up.

The writer also forgets that there is a difference between the practical values one is compelled to live by and and the romantic values people impossibly aspire to. The later is amplified in local public opinion. Sooner or later the young romantics (those who have not been forced out of the city by high housing costs and the difficulties in our schools), ahem, "grow up". Nevertheless, many, if not most San Franciscans, the people who do not slum in the author's favorite cafe, or who do not write crank letters to the editor, are in fact grown up.

The only thing wrong with the composting law is the how and why of its implementation. It's window dressing, not real public policy. And because this city's press seems to captivated by the values of the political and chattering classes, symbolic policy is all we get, and all we get to hear about. Shouldn't the Appeal be doing something different?

As for the comments on sexual mores, perhaps the article is more on target. Apart from the various out communities the City's chattering classes do seem to comport themselves in private in a manner almost, I dare say, prudish, if not furtive. I don't date political people anymore because all too often it ends up like watching a David Lynch movie.