A Love Letter to The Town
By: The Rethink Oakland Team
- Why refusing to stay silent is the only honest form of loyalty.
There is a kind of heartbreak only someone who has lived inside Oakland can understand, the heartbreak of loving a Town that asks so much of its people and gives so little back in return. For most people in this Town, daily life has become an uphill climb.
And the heartbreak is not poetic. You see it in the boarded up windows, the empty storefronts, the security gates around places that used to feel open, and in the silence where there used to be noise. Even the teams that once carried the soul of this Town — the Warriors, the Raiders, and the A’s — chose to leave, not because Oakland stopped caring, but because city leadership stopped leading, leadership that chooses ideology over pragmatism.
Oakland has always had its share of struggle. Poverty, crime, and dysfunction are not new here. But what is different now is that the excuses no longer cover the truth. The consequences are out in the open and ordinary residents live with them every day.
Crime is no longer a headline — it is something we live around.
Homelessness is not a “challenge” — it is collapse in plain view.
Businesses are not quietly relocating — they are leaving to survive.
City leadership is not merely imperfect — it is insulated from consequence.
And worst of all, dissent is not engaged — it is socially excommunicated.
Too many who claim to love this Town are more loyal to a narrative than to the people living with its consequences. Decline is defended not because it protects Oaklanders, but because it protects identities, institutions, and egos built on the illusion that failure is proof of virtue.
I am not writing this out of resentment for Oakland, but because real love does not ignore what is broken. Real love criticizes not to destroy but to repair. To love this Town is to want the people who live here to prosper, not to survive under lowered expectations in the name of someone else’s ideology.
Rethink Oakland exists for those who already feel this, for the residents who see what is happening, who are done pretending, and who still believe The Town is worth salvaging. This is for the ones who know something is wrong and refuse to silence their own common sense.
I refuse to give up on The Town, and I am asking others who feel the same to stop staying silent. If we care about Oakland, we cannot keep pretending. The Town deserves better, and so do the people who call it home.
