The cool quiet streets of Santa Cruz, California are home to elegant purveyors of hand-made goods, legal advice, dental procedures, and technological widgets that have consumed the globe. Those residents live the whimsical life of a brief paddleboard session in the morning prior to boarding their company owned shuttle, or a hike through the redwoods during lunch, or perhaps a casual outing on their yacht just before enjoying supper at home with their family in their beach bungalow. They’re an amicable sort in Santa Cruz. They’re known for their revolutionary tone of the nineteen-sixties, but since affluence has swelled, the liberal sentiment is but a dandelion in the breeze these days.

Today, the beaches swell with visitors from surrounding cities and counties as locals look on distrustfully, considering that these over-enthusiastic patrons of the struggling economy are but a plague to recreation. Here Santa Cruz waits, and ponders, and when the streets slow, the beaches fill and our social patience is taxed to it’s limits, they seise the moment with an aggravated blind ignorance to deliver the heavy hand of hate.

The target varies, but no matter the community, the result is the same, the dismantling of enlightened society into segregated classes and the resulting inhumane destruction of those unworthy.

Today, in Santa Cruz, this class is deemed loiterers and the homeless. Business owners, workers and eager bigots enjoy exercising wealth, perceived self-worth and their exalted intellect to initiate vigorous counter-measures against the imagined enemy.

Seeking to destroy, the effect has been a struggle against themselves as they illuminate the night and pierce the peaceful calm in an incessant automated rage, an Orwellian message from the supreme shop-keeper to all, “Mind Yourself. Mind My Property. Mind My Wealth. Mind My Instructions. Go. Leave. Disperse You Homeless!”

It repeats, from dusk till dawn, it envelops the river, it envelops our guests, our community, our children, our pets. The birds and I can only assume the fish. It is the cry of the frightened Oz behind his curtain of money. The incessant tones of the night continue and reign supreme.

We are but slaves.