We were out at Ocean Beach yesterday. Beautiful weather. Lots of families and tourists out exploring the ruins of the Sutro Baths. As part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the ruins are affected by the shutdown, but they’re open. Yesterday visitors kept edging past each other on the uneven tops of those old masonry pool walls. It made me nervous: no handrails, and in places those narrow walking surfaces run between open box-sided pits full of rain and salt water. No rangers in sight. But the gift and coffee shop was open at the top of the old cement stairs — the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy runs it.

As Sarah Kendzior has argued, the shutdown serves Republican privatization goals. The longer this goes on, the more we’ll substitute private systems for public ones. Fewer public entitlements could mean more privately invented rules about who counts as a member of society — and what it means to be left out. More latitude for discrimination and corruption. Less traction for assertions of rights — to benefits, to services, to equal protection of the laws.

So if the shutdown drags on, and charities start to fill in for more governmental functions, the charities in turn have some thinking to do about rights and governance. Continue reading →

Langton Street a few nights ago in the rain. Nothing like San Francisco for the look of reflected streetlights on rainy pavements in fog. Not made for sleeping, though.