A friend of ours is a nurse. She came to the city via a recruiting agency, works in St. Mary's and CPMC, and has the societal perspective that can only be gained in a takes-all-comers emergency room. She gets the homeless drunks from Golden Gate Park, the bullet-riddled crack dealers from the Housing Authority, and the usual assortment of mentally ill, heart-attacks, car crashes, and other misfortunes. In a few short years, she has transformed from a fresh-off-the-boat newcomer to a seasoned city nurse.
What strikes me is that, although she has to wear a special mask to undress the scabies-encrusted homeless at St. Mary's, she much prefers that to dealing with the rich patients at CPMC. She has no political grudge against them, and indeed she lives quite close to, if not in, Pacific Heights, yet she is paradoxically repelled by the attitude that her very own neighbors put forth.
My wife told me this story, and I immediately agreed. Somehow, despite their best efforts, their millions of dollars raised for the Democrats, and their ethnically diverse $20,000-per-year pre-schools, the rich of San Francisco do not inspire much if any affection among the public.
Much of this problem may stem from the road-to-Hell effect, where good intentions, expressed with money, cause more problems than they solve. For instance, there are no housing projects in Pacific Heights, but I'm sure may Democratic donors and politicians there would extoll the virtues of helping the poor and wretched grow up that way in HUD housing, as long as it's someone else's problem to deal with the non-monetary issues.
Now, it's unfair to blame rich people for faults of others. Indeed, well-educated and economically self-sufficient people commit few crimes, don't disturb their neighbors, and generally behave in ways that free up police and tax money for use in more distressed areas. But this freedom from problems, if you will, does not lead to an ability to solve the problems that do occur.
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