Don’t look twice — you just might see something

So according to the last eye doctor I visited, I’m extremely near-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other.

That struck me as unsettling. So I asked, “Should I consider laser-eye surgery to correct that?” He looked surprised. “Oh no, absolutely not,” he said. “You’ve got what I’d call one-in-a-million monovision. Your eyes perfectly compensate for each other. Your vision is what we hope to match when we do laser surgery on people.”

So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Of course, being 62, my eyes aren’t always as sharp as they once were. I especially notice it at night, when I’m driving. All of which leads to this revelation:

Friday night, while driving home after a pretty long day, I saw a sign in front of a minimart that said “We sell freal shakes.” Only, to my weary nighttime eyes, it said “We sell feral snakes.”

I remember sitting at the light and wondering “Why would anybody want to pay for a feral snake when there are so many free ones around in the summer?” Then I rubbed my eyes, took a second look and ended up asking myself a second question, which is “What in the heck is a freal shake?”

Anyway, the whole episode got me thinking about eyesight, and driving, and how easy it is to see what we’re being told we should see instead of what’s actually there. So Saturday morning, I took a long drive around Chico, and thought about everything that’s going on in our purple little town.

You don’t need 20-20 vision to know people are angry. Really angry. Conservatives are mad about the homeless settlement, even to the point of turning on the conservative council that these very same people were so eager to put into power in the first place. Apparently, the fact that the conservative council finally saw the legal handwriting on the wall, and accepted a settlement that would avoid several more years of backbreaking legal fees without any ability for enforcement, was a bad thing. So now the conservatives want to put people on the council who are even more far to the right than the ones already there in hopes they’ll “turn this situation around” and “quit enabling these homeless people” and, you know, double down on the kind of short-sighted thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

(Note to the hard-of-seeing: When a federal judge speaks, it’s usually a pretty good idea to listen, and obey.)

Meanwhile, liberals are mad at the conservative council for “violating the Constitution” and “costing taxpayers millions” by pushing the enforcement of the ordinances a year ago, all of which led to the Martin vs. Boise-inspired lawsuit. They’re continuing their efforts to recall councilor Sean Morgan and Mayor Andrew Coolidge, both of whom are now also under fire from parts of their conservative base for agreeing to the terms of the settlement.

And yet, if memory serves correct, the liberals held a 5-2 advantage on the council as recently as 14 months ago. Remind me again how many congregate homeless shelters got built in Chico when the liberals held the purse strings? You know, some of the people who never stop accusing the conservatives of wanting people to freeze to death?

Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows in Chico. It occasionally makes people have short memories, too.

Anyway, lots of people are angry, and many are pointing fingers of blame. Sometimes, of course, those fingers are pointed at us.

One letter writer recently said our editorial a week ago was a “middle finger” to Chico. Well, we love Chico. Sometimes in life, you tell loved ones things they might not want to hear. (And feedback to that editorial was typical; blasted in some social media forums, and praised by the middleof-the-road silent majority that tends to reach out directly. Yes, there really does exist a huge swath of people in this town who are as disgusted by the ongoing lack of common sense and civility as we are.)

The same writer later told me he never takes his wife downtown anymore because it’s “not safe,” even though the official crime statistics tend to tell us something else, especially compared with many other towns in our state. (Yes, according to the FBI numbers in this chart, there are 105 towns in our state in worse shape property-crime-wise than ours, and — surprise! — most of them even have homeless people. Chico doesn’t exactly rank very close to the medal stand in terms of violent crime either.) Yet the only numbers that seem to matter around here are how many people jump onto Facebook forums and complain how out-of-whack-awful our town is — even though, again, this is a statewide and national problem not unique to Chico. But it’s an easy narrative to maintain in the world of groupthink, where hate and fear multiply more rapidly than rabbits on Viagra.

These were the things on my mind as I began my drive.

I went from the E-R office to Comanche Creek which, of course, remains a mess. But it’s a mess I see in dozens of towns all over the north state. Of all the short-sighted comments I see and hear these days, the notion that Chico “attracts people from all over the state” and is “a mecca for the homeless” remains the nuttiest. It happens everywhere in our state and all over the West Coast, in ever-growing numbers. If you don’t think so, you really need to get out of town and drive around Sacramento or Eureka or Santa Cruz or Salinas or Vallejo or San Francisco or even parts of Red Bluff and Woodland and Vacaville and Lake County and so many of the others areas we reported on a few months ago. It’s everywhere, folks. Open your eyes, and any one town and its so-called “enabling” ranks so far down the list of reasons for homelessness, you’d need a telescope to find it.

I continued up Park and through downtown. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, so I stopped and walked a few blocks, as peaceful and safe as I feel every time out. Everybody I saw seemed happy, going about their downtown business. Of course, none of those people were on social media at the moment; they were out and about enjoying the town, the same one praised so widely in our “Why we (still) love Chico” feature a couple of months back.

I continued up the Esplanade. I passed a “recall” booth that had a couple of visitors. I wondered which side of the aisle the visitors were on and what the dialogue was like. (It reminded me of the scene in “The Outlook Josey Wales” when the ferry operator said “You know, in my line of work, you got to be able either to sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ or ‘Dixie’ with equal enthusiasm depending upon present company.”)

I stopped at a store and saw people loading up for the 49ers-Packers game that afternoon. Man, it felt good to be around real people living their real lives. So I decided to ruin it by looking at a local Facebook group and writing the first comment I saw. It was, of course, about the congregate housing site.

“So meals are going to be “served up?” A real Hotel California. The floodgates have been opened with no way to stem the tides.”

Ah, yes. The old “if we build it they will come” line of thinking. Of course, there are already thousands of these Pallet shelters up and down the West Coast, including some less than an hour away, all at locations that also serve meals. If these shelters are such an “attraction,” how come all of the homeless people in Chico haven’t already left town to go live in them? I posed that question to at least a dozen people in email exchanges the past week. Literally none had an answer.

And that’s probably a good thing. Honestly, I’m argued out. I’m tired of trying to have commonsense discussions on this topic with people who get all of their information from social-media czars who are doubling down on their “Chico needs to get tougher on the homeless” narrative — regardless of how many times that narrative was slapped down in court the past year.

Instead, more than ever, I’m going to trust my eyes, two still pretty-good eyes that continue to see a whole lot of good in this town along with the same bad I see almost everywhere — bad that, by and large, is never going to go away without a major shift in this country’s attitude toward crime (nobody is a bigger fan of keeping criminals locked up than I am) and mental health (until there are more resources poured into this, the homeless situation is never going to change to any earth-shaking degree, period).

I’m especially going to keep my eyes focused on the steps that are being taken for solutions, and the need for the plaintiffs (and company) in the homeless lawsuit to keep their word that this entire affair was about “a lack of available shelter.” We’ve got shelter coming and services being offered by some truly caring and fantastic people. Please; use it all, and turn your lives around. I’m pulling for you, and I’m pulling for the well-being of our entire town.

One might say this is a one-in-a-million opportunity for everybody, on all sides of this issue, to look in the mirror and then look at their neighbor and bite their lip and try to find some common ground to change things for the better, instead of embarking on yet another day of blasting your neighbors on social media. We’ve been trying that for years. It doesn’t work.

That’s the Chico I (still) see, and the one I still believe can emerge from this hate-filled mess.

Don’t let any snake — feral or not — mess that up.