It’s time for Oakland to fight for its soul

“Jogger Joe.”

“BBQ Becky.”

The past few weeks have been a disheartening window into Oakland’s entry into the advanced stages of gentrification.

It’s particularly distressing to watch this moment in Oakland from across the bay, because it feels like deja vu.

I’ve seen this story many times before. I know where it’s going. I know how sad the ending is.

But before we take our sad trip down memory lane, let’s talk about the good news.

Oakland has been publicly inundated with the worst kinds of gentrifiers lately, and it’s responded with beautiful fighting spirit.

“Jogger Joe” is an Oakland man, Henry Sintay, who paused during his shirtless jog around Lake Merritt last Friday to snatch a homeless man’s belongings and throw them into the water.

Shocked bystanders filmed his actions, which caused an uproar on social media. Sintay returned to the lake the next day, and, in an incident streamed onto Facebook, he allegedly attacked and grabbed the phone of another person who’d begun shooting video of him. On Monday, Sintay was arrested on suspicion of robbery.

A few weeks before this, Michelle Snider recorded video of a woman calling the police on her husband, Kenzie Smith, and his friend, Onsayo Abram, as the two men — both African American — grilled food on Lake Merritt. The three-hour ordeal ended with “BBQ Becky” crying to the police about her mistreatment.

Oakland’s African American community responded to being treated as a public nuisance by hosting a massive barbecue on the lake. “BBQ Becky” was last seen in public as a meme on “Saturday Night Live.”

As a San Franciscan, I’ve watched these incidents with alarm. They are proof that the Bay Area’s extreme economic and racial disparities have hopped across the bay and engulfed Oakland as completely as they engulfed my own city.

But the flip side is Oakland’s vigorous response. That, too, has provoked painful memories.

There was a time — not so long ago — when San Francisco used to stand up to ugly interlopers. Why does it feel so long ago? Well, one of the funny things about gentrification is how it warps time.

Say you pass a new restaurant that’s been freshly painted and newly decked out in post-industrial chic. The erasure is so thorough that you have to strain to remember what was in that space just months ago — even if it’s a pupuseria you used to frequent every week.

Once the new restaurant has dominated that space for a few months —with Yelp reviews and magazine spreads and lines of yoga-toned brunchers — you’re too busy trying to avoid its force field to remember the previous inhabitants at all. All you feel, when you walk past, is a vague, disgruntled sense of disempowerment, relative poverty and deep foreboding.

This is how lots of people in Oakland are feeling about their entire city right now. Extreme incidents simply allow them to express this grief in an open, passionate way. The feelings are all very new, because gentrification is a relatively new proposition in Oakland.

But they won’t be new forever.

San Francisco, for example, used to be a city on fire with resistance to the avalanche of invasive capital that’s inching its way over every bit of this region. Remember:

⏩ $4 toast: For a few weeks, news that a shiny new hipster cafe in San Francisco was selling $4 toast became a rallying cry, even inspiring petitions to the mayor’s office demanding relief from the cost of living.

Today, the co-owner of that particular cafe has been sued for sexually assaulting his employees, artisanal bread in San Francisco costs as much as $29 a loaf, and the cost of living has gone nowhere but up.

⏩ Greg Gopman: In 2013, Gopman, then a 27-year-old arriviste startup CEO, made a number of controversial public comments comparing homeless people to trash and suggesting that the “lower part” of San Francisco’s society needed to learn how to “keep to themselves.”

San Francisco responded by shredding the thing most important to Gopman: his online reputation. Undaunted, he was last seen publicly hawking his latest idea to fight homelessness — housing people on a cruise ship.

All of these incidents now feel as distant as an AOL CD-ROM. But that, too, is an important piece of guidance: San Franciscans used to have the energy to push against every incident, no matter how seemingly small and silly.

Today, we’re too busy trying to pay the ever-increasing rent.

Fight for your city now, Oaklanders. Otherwise, there soon won’t be much left for which to fight.

There was a time — not so long ago — when San Francisco used to stand up to ugly interlopers.