Life during the plague
It was around 8:30am when I did so. I took the infamous 405. Reams of jokes have been written by we Angelenos about spending hours stuck in its sclerotic traffic. You can mention the 405 to some small-town resident of Alabama, and because of television and movies, they'll have some idea of what you mean.
The freeway was empty. I don't mean that traffic was lighter than normal. I mean that I was doing 80 all the way from Inglewood until I exited the freeway on Hawthorne Blvd.
My city is a ghost town. I drove down Hawthorne to get to Torrance Blvd., where the imaging center was located. I passed by the South Bay Galleria. By the time I did so, normally the parking lot would be at least half full with the cars of employees getting ready for the day. Empty. Strip malls along the street were empty.
My city is a ghost town. Unless a shopping center has a supermarket or a pharmacy, it's as if a neutron bomb had been detonated, and all the people had been incinerated, leaving only the memory of human civilization.
Los Angeles is a vibrant, buzzing place, full of people going places, doing things. It's now dead. It's as if someone has pulled the plug, or stopped the film. One of the world's great cities is shuttered. One sees only the homeless on the street.
This emptiness is a metaphor for the emptiness of our leadership. As a plague sweeps over the country, the soi disant president can't manage to become bigger than himself. He has, if anything, become more petty, smaller than anyone could think possible. He's using the emergency to attempt to puff himself up. But it's a failure, as anything else he's done. He's shown himself to be, again, small-minded, not up to the moment. Many people are aghast that some polls show a rallying around the flag. George W. Bush benefited from that after 9/11. His approval numbers were in the 90s. This man can't even break 50%. He can't manage even the benefit of the doubt normally accorded presidents during a time of national crisis, because he's abnormal in every shape and form.
My city will return. It's full of strivers and dreamers. It's full of immigrants who traversed horrors to make new lives for themselves. It's full of geniuses, and it's full of ordinary people living ordinary, full lives. My city will return. But now I mourn for it, because it's full of ghosts. One doesn't know what one has until it's taken away, even if temporarily. Now that I'm home, I want to go out to a bar and shoot the breeze with the bartender. I want to sit down to a meal in a restaurant. I want to go shopping for shoes. I want to curl my toes on a sandy beach. I want to sit in traffic, the smell of exhaust about me, as I blast my car radio. I want life to be life again.
Good will come out of this emergency. And the best that will come out of it is that we won't take the quotidian for granted again. We won't grouse about traffic on the 405, or about the asshole in the supermarket. Or, we will, but then we'll remember the alternative, and it won't seem so bad.
My city is a ghost town. Let there be a resurrection.