Madness in SF: Rules for Bay to Breakers & Sit/Lie

Tomorrow, San Francisco will host its annual Bay to Breakers race, which is not so much a race as an extravagant parade composed of some of the stranger sites in an already strange city. The "race" began in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake as a way to promote civic pride. For decades, it was a wonderful raucous celebration, involving drugs, copious alcohol, and the necessity of open public urination. (San Francisco, for those of you unacquainted with the city, has almost no public restrooms, so public urination is something practiced by necessity even by embarrassed tourists to our fair city.)

We're a long from the glory days of the Bay to Breakers. Tomorrow will be a corporate-sponsored, corporate-managed event carefully scripted to avoid any of its original vitality or fun. The race is now the "ING Bay to Breakers," ING being the acronym of the Dutch Internationale Nederlanden Groep.

It is unclear why this annual event of civic pride needs corporate sponsorship,

but for whatever reason, ING has sought to ban the very things that make the race worthwhile: floats, nudity, alcohol, fun. ING probably won't succeed in imposing all of the draconian restr

ictions it wishes, but the race has nonethele

ss lost its meaning. Perhaps in the future, citizens should organize an alternate parade--say, on the Saturday before the Bay to Breakers, that will simply be a flash-mob of people wishing to celebrate the original Rabelaisian spirit of the race.

At the same time that the Bay to Breakers is being strangled by Taliban-like bans, San Francisco is wrestling with a new "sit/lie" ordinance.

While the Bay to Breakers restrictions seek to impose unreasonable order, this sit/lie ordinance is being opposed by unreasonable advocates for the homeless. The reality in SF is that many areas of the city are so overrun with homeless sitting and lying on the sidewalk that no one in his or her reasonable mind would wish to go there.

The sit/lie ordinance is a rational first step toward cleaning up the city. There should be no right to camp out on city sidewalks, especially when that camping is so unsightly and disruptive.

Yet this sit/lie ordinance garners a tremendous about of vehemence against it by those who would protect the rights of violent, aggressive homeless against the rights of citizens and those increasingly-few tourists who wish to spend much-needed money in San Francisco.

SF needs to clean up--starting with the sidewalks. SF also needs to protect its unique cultural identity by not surrendering events such as Bay to Breakers to puritanical corporations such as ING.