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I grew up in San Francisco during the 60's and '70s. It was a great place to be a kid, but the predominant culture took an enormous toll on my life for which I'm still paying. I would never raise a child there now. It's just too risky.

We moved out in the early '70s. I lived on the water in Oakland for a decade and that was a unique experience. I still live in the Bay Area but I don't go to the city often. I guess my favorite place is still the Maritime Museum but I just don't like dealing with the creeps.

The gays don't bother me in practice as much as in principle. I've seen just about everything; It's the lies they tell and the damage they do to others to which I object and it's real. They don't make me squeamish no matter how hard they try. What's really funny is how they take it when you feed their crap back to them. That hard "balls out" exterior is really brittle, and beneath it is a self-hatred so deep that either real violence or deep depression isn't far behind.

The bums are just gross, and as a visitor you have to deal with them. It's different as a resident.

I miss the place, but I wish they'd go away.

Why did we ever let the sickos get the good real estate?

Interesting. The problem with SF is it seems like as it has microclimates of the weather it also has social microclimates. For kids, for instance, it seems to be two entirely different cities, depending on where you live and who you know.

If we can use school test scores, which are about as good a proxy for the state of kid-culture as any, the school district is an entirely different animal on the east and west sides. On the east side the schools are almost unversally as dismal as in Oakland. On the west side they are about what you would expect in Novato.

Also note that SF has the best public high school in California, Lowell, better than those in Palo Alto, which is one of the best in the country as a whole. The Lowell graduating classes I've seen (my wife is an alumna) are so impressive in their intellectual horsepower as to be almost scary. I would be very proud to have my children go to Lowell.

The main reason I think the sickos got in was that the old mainly Catholic ethnic residents moved out to the suburbs. These politically active people formerly voted in rational governments. When they left they were replaced by a combination of politically inactive Asians and an assortment of malcontents from across the US, who achieved power by default.