A BEAUTIFUL DAY

 

It is a beautiful day in Southern California… too cold for me, of course, but almost 70 degrees with the sun shining and… on this Sunday afternoon… smack dab between volatile windstorms.

When I was a kid out here in the greater LA area, I remember looking forward to the Santa Ana (so-called) “Devil Winds.” It was so special… the hot wind blowing in from the desert in the middle of January, warming everything up and clearing out the smog from our city and suburban skies as the wind patterns were reversed from the norm, now flowing from land to sea, instead of the usual offshore marine layer coming over the basin to cool everything down.

If you went to the beach during those days of the Santa Anas, the skies were the bluest you could ever remember seeing, but out there on the horizon, there was a black horizontal Crayola-like line that was all the gunk that the winds had taken from our city and deposited at sea.

There was something very sensual and downright sexy about it as well. At least that is what I remember from my teenage years. In fact, I cannot recall anything but welcoming thoughts about those winds… until now.

I am out here in the land of my birth, recovering from a surgical procedure. The repairs to the Fisher Island sea wall and other infrastructure upgrades made the decision to leave my Florida island a little easier… especially when Thanksgiving and Christmas were factored in along with my kids and theirs, who almost all reside in Southern California. What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The alarm to evacuate the small Studio City house where I have been recuperating came unexpectedly. I made the (I thought) very educated choice to reserve a room at a hotel in downtown LA… far from any of the madness of the multiple fire zones plaguing the area. My thought was, with thousands of newly homeless people coming into town from the beaches and the Palisades, the nearby hotels of Beverly Hills would be jammed. Score one for me. There was plenty of room at the inn downtown.

The night in that hotel bed was less comfortable than I had hoped as I began to remember the things I probably should have taken with me. Then came the dawn with the “All Clear” from Studio City… the evacuation of my neighborhood was no longer mandatory.

People had lost their homes… some, their lives. I continued to live under the lucky star that has been there in the heavens my entire life.

Back at the Studio City house I began to watch MSNBC’s Katy Tur. Turns out she was born and raised in California’s Pacific Palisades and now she was back there in that Southern California residential community on assignment in what looked like something we have all become accustomed to seeing in reports from the Gaza Strip. Her interviews with contemporaries who had been living in the community she once occupied… who had children in the schools she once attended… were made even more poignant by the unhappy fact that this community… those schools… were now all rubble that would take years to reconstruct.

There on TV was failed mayoral candidate, Rick Caruso, blaming his former opponent, the current mayor, for failures of preparation for a disaster the likes of which had never been seen in any American city in history. The Palisades fire alone (one of several such blazes in Southern California) covered a larger geographic space than the entire borough of Manhattan in New York. There was the fire in Altadena which was also massive in a community that had never had anything of this magnitude happen in its past. A large fire in Woodland Hills and one in the hills of Hollywood as well.

Caruso reminded me of our recent national elections and of my oft-stated thesis that we get the kind of leadership we get because, if nothing else, Americans are good at watching television and these bombastic blamers and shamers make for good TV.

There is something else we, as a people, are very good at, and that is evading or avoiding paying taxes. As a society, we have all pretty much agreed that if there is a loophole… take it. Face it, few ever say, if there is a loophole, fill it; correct it for the greater good of all.

The current LA mayor, who has been in office less than two years, should not be the target for malfeasance. It is us, and our parents… and their parents… who continually and perpetually squeezed politicians and government coffers so as not to allow for the kind of infrastructure to be constructed that would support the ever increasing/sprawling population of a place such as Southern California.

The damns, the aqueducts, the methods of supplying sufficient water for emergencies such as fires, the burying of power lines underground, the recognition of a thing called Global Warming and doing something about it… all these things cost money, and government gets its money from taxes, which seemingly all its citizens want to lower… or not pay at all. News flash: you cannot have it both ways.

Readers of these missives know I have recently driven across the country… 24 days on the blue lane highways from Miami Beach to Los Angeles. I can report that the worst roads I encountered on that trip were in Southern California. Potholes, cracked sidewalks, and a failing infrastructure are evident throughout LA. It has been a long time since Ronald Reagan made it okay to disregard the true function of government with his too-clever-by-half remark:  

“…the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Our 40^th President spoke those words, and since that time, nearly every US politician has had to heed the “wisdom” of that mocking comment, or face the consequences at election time.

Something wiser was said a few years before Reagan by a cartoon character named Pogo when he uttered, “…We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 “…Each country has the government it deserves”, Winston Churchill said. He might well have added… “and is willing to pay for.”

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Try having that in the 21^st century without a flushing toilet, or running water, or adequate protection from wind-driven flames. Hell, most of us have discovered we cannot have those basic things without a cellphone.

There is an old show business joke--- the punchline is “…pay the two dollars.” Until we are willing to do just that… to ante up and collectively pay the toll that our modern society requires… the depressing, life-altering, awful consequence that has hit my old hometown in the past few days will be merely the Coming Attractions… events that will be “coming soon” to a community near you.

Barney Rosenzweig