Escape From LA Is No Longer A Futuristic Fantasy
Fires, mudslides, earthquakes, Hollywood (usually out of town), half a million homeless, train thefts, extreme cosmetic surgery, and billionaires … what is not to love about California?
“Jeez,” I said to Bruce — did you see the videos of the fire under the 10 Freeway?
He hadn’t.
Last night, a massive 200-yard by 200-yard fire incinerated everything located under Interstate 10 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. The fire destroyed the concrete and rebar: the freeway will not be open again for a long time.
The first reports I saw mentioned that it had burned the large homeless encampment which has been beneath the freeway for decades. Then I saw it referred to as a “pallet fire.” Pictures appeared to depict massive stacks of wood shipping pallets: yes, ultra-flammable wood stacked right up to the freeway which, in this location, is elevated at least three storeys above street level.
“It’s like ‘Escape From LA’ is real,” I said. In the 90s, John Carpenter and the original “Escape From New York” hero Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken) made a sequel to the 80s’ camp classic which featured freaky homeless people, a bombed-out LA landscape, and countless explosions and laughably-extreme mayhem.
As the original tour guide for the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Homelessness (2010) of Skid Row & South Los Angeles, yes, there was a big homeless encampment right there under I-10 where the fire occurred.
I-10 in East LA is the most-traveled freeway in the U.S. and it is shut down.
Check out this headline:
The homeless encampments in the area looked like this over the summer:
Near these downtown LA garden spots are the Union Pacific railroad tracks. These high-quality transit corridors now look like this:
Since the 2020 pandemic, organized thieves have been taking advantage of the way rail cars back up under the freeway, taking bolt cutters, and breaking into shipping containers, stealing what they find useful and dumping everything else right along the tracks.
Obviously there aren’t enough rail cops to handle the problem: anybody who’s ever had the misfortune of encountering them knows that if they did find these thieves at work, results wouldn’t be good: for the thieves.
Either that, or there could be another explanation about how the rail cops have let this get this bad? Can you think?
It might be the same reason somebody let an as-yet unidentified business pile massive stacks of flammable wood pallets two storeys high right under I-10.
A Refugee Grieves
I just read that nearly 1 million people have left California since 2020 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As recently as a year ago, state officials were still trying to present that the state wasn’t losing population.
I get it. I was Teacher of the Year at Saddleback College in 2018: by the next year, I didn’t have a job.
And therefore, no longer being tied to our substandard two-bedroom apartment with the 1960s linoleum floors, World’s Cheapest Refrigerator and $2,100/month rent, I could move to Southwest Florida, where we now own our home and are living a happier, healthier lifestyle than either of us ever dreamed possible. Bruce, you see, is from Philly and lived more recently in New Jersey before moving to Southern California to marry me.
This recent Business Insider article profiles nine different Californians who have left the state over the past year, giving their reasons for moving, new states and cities, and their reactions to the move. In general, the reasons for moving were:
High crime/unsafe
High cost of living
Long commutes
Pollution
Poor quality of life/bad for families/children
You can consider Bruce and me the vanguard of this now-profiled group (3.5 years later). He was/is a highly-experienced and qualified engineer. I was, as I noted, an experienced and popular community college teacher as well as writer.
California didn’t want us. And the other near-million people who have moved so far?
Didn’t want them, either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about this who knows anything about it thinks that California only wants the very rich and the very poor. Anyone in-between?
Get the HELL OUT.
That’s what’s happening, anyway.
People put these problems down to politics, but I think the more accurate term is: corruption.
There has always been corruption in California. And, there have always been individuals lauded as visionaries who turned out, perhaps, to be less-than that. William Mulholland brought water to Los Angeles, but he also constructed the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed in 1928, killing more than 450 people and bringing an end to Mulholland’s water czardom. Mulholland also took all the water from the Owens River Valley in Central California, creating permanent damage to the state’s ecosystems and turning the valley into a toxic, ultra-polluted dust-filled ghost region.
I tell new clients who have agriculture businesses, “I grew up in an orange grove.”
The California I grew up in is so long-gone that it’s almost not worth mentioning.
Not only is it gone, it has been paved over into a parking lot, a strip mall, a multiplex, a drive-through carwash, a Jiffy-Lube, a cookie-cutter housing development of 3-bedroom bungalows now selling for $825,000 —
California used to have a public education system that was the envy of the United States and even the world. The UC and Cal State systems boasted highly-affordable tuition, only about $2,000 in 1965. Now, a four-year degree at a top UC school easily tops $120,000. I taught at a community college and they made these schools tuition-free for the first year … but here’s the catch. Students who needed extra help were not going to get it. So if they couldn’t pass their required English and Math courses quickly, they were not going to get a degree at all.
But these schools didn’t need or want the Teacher of the Year any more either.
A Pack of Lies
Over my lifetime, I’ve watched everything that I thought was true when I was growing up crumble into a gaggle of incoherent lies and nothingness.
Work hard and you’ll be successful!
I watched my top, straight-A students transfer to UC Irvine and get degrees in biotech or computer science and struggle to even get part-time, $20/hour jobs.
Work hard, get married, buy a house and start a family!
See above. Fortunately here in Florida, my daughter and her boyfriend do have a hope of accomplishing that goal.
We can help the homeless if we just work together!
I could write many thousands of words about this and have already written three articles about the true reasons behind the homelessness crisis.
We watched a documentary about Native Californians and the struggles and oppression that they endured between the Mission era and even up to today. Countless young Native children were taken from their homes and forced into schools where their hair was shorn and they were beaten if they spoke their own language. Without even fully understanding what I was doing, I wrote a story, “Jonny Punkinhead,” inspired by the “Indian” school near where I grew up, the Sherman Institute. I made the young protagonist a young, virus-changed boy with a head the size and shape of a pumpkin, not a Native American boy.
Bruce and I, fortunately, just had to physically flee California so we could live a stable, reasonably healthy life instead of fearing homelessness daily.
One of the last places I hiked before we left California for good was Tomo-Kahni State Park near Tehachapi. I went with the California Rock Art Foundation and learned about the petroglyphs and rock art preserved in the park. So, the Native Americans had to collect money to buy the land and create a state park. The volunteers told a long, convoluted story about how long it took to accomplish that goal. The park’s marker was even turned away from the parking lot to deter vandals. That’s right. Someone, hearing about the park’s establishment, went in and defaced the petroglyphs.
When I used to hike different areas, I’d refer to the “diaper zone,” a half-mile region near parking lots and trailheads where people would carelessly toss dirty diapers. Because of the general physical and mental fitness of those who would do something like that, this zone was, mercifully, fairly close to public parking areas.
I never saw a dirty diaper far into the back country.
The truth is, California was never truly a “promised land” or even the “Golden State.” Only a small number of “49-ers” made any significant money. Instead, the individuals who owned businesses serving them got rich.
As one example, California’s spectacular redwood forests once took up 2 million acres. Only 5% of the forests remain today.
My great grandmother Nallie came to California on the train from Columbia, Missouri. She bore 13 children, but only three survived past infancy. Her husband died when her youngest child, my grandmother, was only 7 years old. She managed to put together a strong business and took care of her family, living out their lives in the house on Lemon Street in Riverside.
One of my father’s favorite stories was how, when he and his six-year-old twin brother Victor woke up on their first morning in Los Angeles, after moving from Hell’s Kitchen, he heard a noise outside and went to the window.
Looking down, he saw the noise was Laurel and Hardy, making a movie in the alley below their row house.
That California isn’t here any more. But the one where the Native American children were torn from their villages and families and land taken by a rich stranger is.
And it really is a tragedy.
A lot of these problems exist elsewhere in the world (including here in Canada), but California's huge size, massive cities and extremely poor infrastructure magnify them all.
"Not only is it gone, it has been paved over into a parking lot, a strip mall, a multiplex, a drive-through carwash, a Jiffy-Lube, a cookie-cutter housing development of 3-bedroom bungalows now selling for $825,000 —"
All of America is this. The system has too much momentum to do anything but destroy itself by paving itself over.
Failures like the I-10 fire will only increase going forward, and the inability to repair or replace such infrastructure will be explained away as "a good thing" by our propaganda services.