Recently in The County Category

As a new convert to and resident of Downtown LA, I was a little bummed to come across this somewhat recent LA Curbed post about the other paper's poke at LA Live. But I was even more troubled by the many ranting, snobby commenters who somehow think they had a magical solution to downtown that would have been so superior to the bright, cheery LA Live. The commenters come across as hip urbanites who find it easy to sniff at wealthy developers but who could never come up with a better solution.

LA Live may not be perfect, but it is a wonderful improvement over what existed here in past years. Having said that, I agree that it could have worked a little harder at creating some low-key places for locals to hang out. As such, LA Live mainly comes alive after a Lakers game or concert ends on a Friday night. It may need to lose a few high-end restaurants, which stand empty on most evenings, and add some coffeehouses and boutique stores.

Our streets are red with blood. Where are the marchers and the outrage? Why the lack of passion for those killed?

Last month was a good month for US forces in Iraq. "Only 19" were killed, way down from previous months and from May of last year. Still though only 19, they were Americans. They had families: mothers, fathers, wives, husbands and children. Anti-war and pro-war Americans alike, will join is mourning these losses. And while each side may draw different conclusions, and formulate different responses, we share in our grief and sense of tragic loss.

While 19 of us died in Iraq in May, this past weekend 14 of us died in Los Angeles from non-accidental violence. So, again, where is the rage? How can it be that this self-slaughter goes so unengaged by the media and the people? Yes, it was headlined in our own Daily News but the Times buried it, virtually without recognition, along with the bodies to be buried this week.

Something is wrong. No, strike that. Many things are wrong with this story. Once upon a time murders made headlines and provoked a reaction by society. Once upon a time the public would have demanded that the government and police do something to stem the tide and staunch the flow of blood in our streets.

Sure, we see brief stories on TV showing grieving parents or schoolmates in tears. Sure, once in a while there is a march and some mom says, "This must not happen again." But it does happen again and again and yet again.

In Iraq when Americans die, there are calls to action--to withdraw or to escalate. There is passion on both sides. Here when Americans die there is virtual silence.

In Iraq, when the elected government fails to disarm the militias we all cry out in rage that the Iraqis are not doing their job. What about our job, our abject failure to disarm our militias: the Crips, the Bloods, the MS13s?

It is so strange to me that we see the tribalism in Africa, but don't recognize it as it is manifest in the Balkans. We see the militias in Iraq but are blind to it as it in our own backyard.

Los Angeles police gang experts estimate that there are 1,200 gangs with 80,000 members here! Do we simply turn a blind eye to them because they are black or brown? Do we ignore the gang graffiti because it is not in our neighborhoods? Do we discount the violence and the death, the drug dealing and intimidation because they are not like us--they are brown, black and poor? As long as they keep the violence amongst themselves, we can pretend. As long as those who mourn do so in a foreign tongue or in black slang, we can act as if these deaths, this level of fear, this degradation of our society somehow doesn't touch us and will never touch us.

Aside from being callas and cruel, this willful ignorance, this numbing of our human sensibilities cannot work in the long run. If not out of compassion but only pragmatism, this tide will touch us, change us and not for the better. It already has, but we are not as aware of our changes as we should be.

In the past decade, we have built more and more gated communities. Iron bars have been installed on houses across the socio-economic spectrum. Our cars have alarms and we are personally alarmed without realizing why. We have built more prisons than schools and have all but abandoned our public schools. We allow over half the kids who start high school to drop out short of graduating. Where do we think they are going? What do we think they are doing?

READ ALL ABOUT IT! They are killing other kids, killing witnesses to their crimes and provoking copycat gang recruitment. To the usual fratricidal Crips and Bloods and the various Hispanic gangs, we now have Asian gangs, Samoan gangs and Armenian gangs. For gang members there are no civilians, no innocent by-standers. If you are unaffiliated, you are fair game.

We can debate whether to get out of Baghdad or Kabul. We can argue whether or not we can bring them democracy or pacify and disarm the militias. But how can we withdraw from Los Angeles? How can we pack up and go to our gated or private security protected homes surrounded by 1,200 gangs and 80,000 armed gang members who are pledged to death destruction? They are keeping their promise to destroy far better than we are keeping our promise to build a decent and civil society.

Some will be tempted to write off the 14 who died this weekend as scum, as illegal's, or only poor people and minorities. We can gate our communities and put locks on our hearts, but the blood will find cracks in our defenses and seep into our souls.

The start of doing something is not dehumanizing them as the evil-doers, though surely they are doing evil. This, however, only re-enforces their own identity as outlaws from a society that hates them. We start by seeing them as people, as children, as our children. We start by allowing ourselves, willing ourselves, to be touched and to mourn for them and their parents. This body count must count. Their lives must count. Their deaths must count and not simply be buried in the back pages of our largest daily paper's grave and in pauper's graves in our barrios and ghettoes. Ignorance, indifference and denial will bring neither hope nor peace--not to them, not to our city and not to our own hearts.

One reader wrote in to note that by reading my "Happy Property Tax Day" post reminded him (or her?) to pay the bill and avoid the late fee. I'm glad I could help, but when I read this I realized that not only are there huge disparities in the amount people pay in property taxes, the late fees are equally unfair. His (her?) late fee is $75 and mine is $193.

understand the disparity of my tax bill is due to Prop. 13, which means wealthy boomers who bought their houses last century might pay a fraction of the property tax that young buyers pay (thanks mom and dad!). I accepted that when I purchased a house. But do they have to stick it to us with a higher late payment as well?

It's property tax day, Don't forget to pay, or they'll take your house away.

If you're like me, you put off paying your Los Angeles County property tax bill to the very last minute possible. It's due today and I still haven't paid it (I will -- I can't afford the nearly $200 late fee!).

Several outrageous things happened and, worse, didn’t happen during the Democratic debate on NPR on Tuesday. I am truly upset and angry with all the Democratic candidates running for the presidential nomination. I am deeply offended mostly at what they did not say.

Loose cannon, former Senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel, usually portrayed as the weird eccentric who is even better for a laugh than Dennis Kucinich, defended Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah. He wondered why we think, “there's something wrong with Iran supporting Hamas and Hezbollah? These are two elected organizations, and — and why can't they (Iran) give support to those organizations? Israel doesn't want it, so why do they (the Democratic candidates) buy hook, line and sinker that they can't give aid to Hamas and Hezbollah?” He continued that, “We give unlimited aid to Israel. These people (the Palestinians) are fighting for their rights.”

Okay, you can say that he is a nut or a radical. You can explain that he doesn’t really represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party. You can marginalize him and explain him away.

What you cannot explain away, forget, or in my view forgive, is the silence of the other Democrats. No one said, “Hey wait. I want to respond to that.” No one distanced themselves from him or followed up his endorsement of the aims and methods of Hamas and Hezbollah with an objection. No one questioned or denounced his creating a “moral equivalence” between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah terrorists.

Notice that he was not simply advocating for a Palestinian state or remarking on the pain of the Palestinians. He was specifically equating Iran’s support of two terrorist organizations that reject a two-state solution and the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, with our aid to Israel. How could this go uncommented upon? If silence connotes assent, what did these candidates convey by their silence?

They all simply moved on to the next question. Maybe they were embarrassed. Possibly they didn’t want to give the issue further airing. They can spin it today as not wanting to “dignify” his rant. However, let’s try a little thought problem: Had he made analogous charges or observations as starkly offensive to Blacks, Hispanics, Asians or gays, can you imagine the other Democrats remaining silent? Don’t you think that someone would have challenged him?

As a life-long liberal, people often challenge me to explain why the Jewish Community is no longer as predictably and overwhelmingly liberal as we once were? Some theorize that once we got money and property, we abandoned our ideals and sense of social justice and compassion. I do not accept this at all. If you want to understand why the center of gravity of the local Jewish Community has moved to the right, listen to the heartbreaking and deafening silence of Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Kucinich and Obama. Remember the famous quotation attributed to Edmond Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men (and one woman) do nothing."

I am also unhappy that this story, Gravel’s words and the silence of the Democrats, has been met with like silence from the media. Where is the outrage? Where is the coverage?

It takes a certain strength of character to say, in the face of failure, that it's no longer all right to keep on doing the same old thing. That's all the more true when all those around you seem content to persist along the same failed course, mired in ideology or the mistakes of the past.

So kudos are in order for Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who today is leading a rally for L.A. youths, urging them to save sex for marriage. Burke is breaking with officials from her own county health department who still insist that throwing condoms at teens is the best way to protect them -- a strategy that, all these years later, has given us the current situation, where one in five California teens has a sexually transmitted disease.

The Condoms Crowd insist that they're giving youths what they need to "protect' themselves, since "they're going to have sex anyway." But this is a strategy we don't employ for any other youth-related social ill: No one says, "To prevent deaths from stray bullets, we need to give our kids target practice and more accurate guns," or "Kids will smoke anyway, so let's make sure they have low-tar cigarettes." Because the result would almost surely be more gun deaths and more lung cancer.

And the results of L.A.'s experiment with condom-based STD prevention speak for themselves. Congratulations to Burke for having the honesty, the integrity, and enough real concern for our youth to say as much.

Coming up with a Great Seal for California or Los Angeles is a fool’s errand. No piece of art or logo design can please everyone or fail to offend many. Art itself is always debatable but add to artistic subjectivism issues of semiotics and symbolism and we are sinking in the mire and subject to the vetoes wielded by the most exquisitely sensitive among us.

As Chris writes, some are trying to get our old seal back, the one where the mission church that is still on the seal, gets its original cross back. If you are going to let the church remain, what is the point of removing the cross? The California Missions were Catholic Churches. This is far worse and sillier than the statuary rape of attaching fig leaves to classic sculptures in Europe.

As a Jew, I am not offended by the accurate depiction of our history with the use of relevant symbols and signs. It is an historic lie to clean up our story. There is something to object to, discuss or learn from the missionary practices and their treatment of our Native American population. But erasers, airbrushes and Photoshop are not the ways to edit our stories.

Our new, and in theory, politically correct seal is still objectionable to the easily offended (or those who have eyes to see). The figure in the center is the Goddess Pomona. No crosses allowed but a Roman Goddess? Picturing the human form is prohibited in many branches of Islam and some Jewish groups out of fear of idolatry. And why is a female portrayed and not a male too? Sexist, objectifying and highly objectionable!

Then how ‘bout that cow—a symbol sacred to Hindus? Why do they get a symbol and my Christian brothers and sisters none? Look at the Masonic tools—the symbols of a secret cult with religious and mystical overtones. Anyone really not know what that fish stands for? It is Christianity sneaking back in. How about those two stars? Do they represent Northern and Southern California or could they be the Old and New Testaments? What about the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Tao? Oh, and that sailing ship. What a slap at our Native Americans, what a painful reminder of the first illegal immigrants and how they enslaved the natives, converted them and brought all kinds of diseases. It too has to go. It all has to go.

Now let’s look at our flag…or just maybe there is a non-controversial seal.

The valiant souls who have been fighting for the restoration of the original Los Angeles County seal think they might get a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. I wish them well. The ACLU-inspired purge of a small cross from the seal three years ago was a gross display of anti-religious intolerance. It would serve the gutless county supervisors and their bully pals at the ACLU well to get their judicial comeuppance.

That said, I find myself less than optimistic that the SCOTUS effort would succeed.

Had the county not caved in to the ACLU -- that is, had it kept the original seal -- and had the ACLU taken the matter to trial, the county would have won easily. The seal never conferred any kind of religious endorsement; it merely acknowledged that the Los Angeles area was settled by Christian missionaries. Like the name "Los Angeles," the old seal pointed to our region's religious heritage without establishing anything close to a state religion.

But, of course, the county didn't fight, opting to surrender to the ACLU. And that has created a much more complicated case.

Anti-religious thinking likely influenced the supes' decision to remove the seal, but short of reading minds, how could that ever be proven in a court of law? And while the Constitution doesn't preclude the county from including a cross on its seal, it certainly doesn't require one, either.

The irony is that when the supes voted to kill the cross, they said they did so to save money -- never mind that changing the insignia on every county vehicle, form, letterhead, etc., would cost $700,000. That was a pittance, they said, compared to what it would have cost in legal expenses to defend the old seal.

But now they find themselves spending untold millions -- they refuse to disclose how much -- to protect their new, politically correct seal. So they've saved the taxpayers nothing, while creating needless controversy and insulting the intelligence of every one of us forced to foot the bill.