Category: Uncategorized

Photo: Peter Guthrie

There is a fantastic website I just discovered called 43 Places. Laid out like a more simplified Flickr, it has photos, stories and tags of places that people have visited and want to talk about.

If you enter “Paris” in the search engine, you can read if the city of lights is worth visiting or not. “The Parisians were uber snobby and everything was so expensive. If it wasn’t for the history I would have been bored out of my mind,” was one comment.

Skokie, IL elicited this entry: “I drove there from Chicago to meet an actor friend of mine.. I didn’t really see much of anything special, though. I saw that the neighborhoods were culturally diverse.. Polish section, Jewish section, German section, etc.. but that’s about it.. before I knew it we ended up in Evanston, which was much prettier in my opinion.” Skokie doesn’t have a Polish section. Maybe he meant Chicago.

Want to visit Perth, Australia? Here is what someone who has lived there 23 years wrote: “i love Perth. it is sucha quiet place though. if you want excitement don’t visit here! But… if you want beaches, sunshine, surf, outdoor pubs, more beaches, and wineries this is the place to go!!!”

Eating in Berlin? “We came across a great restaurant called the Gugelhof which served traditional German food and turns out it was in the guide book – Bill Clinton has dined there with Chancellor Schroeder. Yummy yummy blood sausage and sauerkraut. Fantastich!”

Middle: Photo of Fulham, UK: Helsinki51

“We knew our corner of Fulham was on the downward slide when, instead of hearing songbirds, we started noticing squadrons of crows,” says resident Maxine Fox. “They had grown fat and glossy on a diet of discarded fast food and vomit. It was a shock to discover that an area that was quite smart when we moved there in the late 1980s could go downhill.”

This is a quote from an article in the UK Telegraph entitled, “Going Down in the World” concerning what happens when once solid neighborhoods go into permanent decline. These places do not gain Starbucks, yoga studios, or Gaps, but instead begin to show public disorder, filth and neglect caused by abandonment and poverty.

In Van Nuys, even many single family neighborhoods have multiple cars and trucks parked on the curb: a sign that renters and multiple adults are living together under one roof. Many homeowners do not cut their lawns, they leave trash cans next to the curb, they move out and rent their own homes to sub-leasers. The similarities with declining UK areas is striking.

The article explains more signs of reverse gentrification: “….multi-occupied housing, cracks on pavements, old abandoned mattresses with funny stains on them languishing outside rooming houses.”

Just this morning, here in Van Nuys, I was awakened by the screaming sounds of crows. We often see discarded condoms and fast food wrappers near our home. There are two trucks parked full of junk left on the corner of Gilmore and Columbus every night. Houses near Victory and Columbus look like maximum security prisons with iron gates and regiments of militant Pit Bulls, Dobermans and German Shepherds. There is also that mattress left at the corner of Hamlin and Columbus.

Is someone trying to tell me something?

The only serious venues for discussing politics and other issues these days are on comedy shows: Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart. Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno to a lesser extent.

That is what my friend who worked at the BBC and now in documentary TV told me. She was born in London and now lives in Santa Monica with her husband and son. She is disgusted by the timid American news media, the one-second stories on the NBC Nightly News, the laughable local news in Los Angeles.

The comedic world has supplanted the so-called serious journalist in telling us what is happening. Bill Maher talks to General Zinni, while Matt Lauer questions Tim Russert. Time Magazine, which once featured General DeGaulle and Queen Elizabeth on its covers, now headlines stories about how to feel happier and raise better kids.

There was a time when we looked to the exalted Walter Cronkite for an objective viewpoint steeped in dignity and intellect. Now we look to the clowns to hear the truth.

Who will Bill Maher have on his panel this week? I bet they will speak with more integrity and guts than fork tongued Senator John McCain on “Meet the Press”.

Americans have not seen any large numbers of protests since the Vietnam War era. There were anti-nuclear protests in the early Reagan era, but those soon died down. It’s not as if there weren’t issues that were a matter of life and death: AIDS, job security, homelessness, health care, crime. None of these brought out the placard carrying thousands.

Now we have the awesome sight of hundreds of thousands who are in the streets to demand that America legalize or legislate the status of undocumented workers. Galvanized and politicized against the Sensenbrenner proposal criminalizing illegals, pro-immigrant labor groups are flexing their numbers and influencing the government “to do something”.

But do what? Our own citizens are ailing.

Americans who are born here live with many of the same insecurities as those who crossed the border. They have no job security. The price of housing, transportation, education and a decent neighborhood is out of reach of many of our middle class.

Black, single family households are still drowning in pathos and poverty…as Katrina dramatized. Older Americans struggle to pay for prescription drugs and hospital bills. Millions of retired factory workers are finding their pensions cut back or eliminated. India and China are surpassing us in higher education and economic growth. The environment is under attack by reactionary Republicans who promise a gas refund and drilling in a wildlife preserve in Alaska. Our national debt is financed by Beijing and Tokyo. We are going in the wrong direction on almost every front of domestic policy.

In rural Nebraska and other areas of the Great Plains, towns are dying. In our coastal metro-sexual cities, such as San Francisco, Boston, Miami and Seattle, housing is out of reach of most mom-dad w/kids families. We are waging a war to promote our values in Iraq, yet we haven’t transformed our own Nation for the better.

While the marchers today may be loosely characterized as “illegals” or “latinos” or “labor”, they are the embodiment of the American dream. They want a better way of life, and are willing to speak out for it. They are teaching those cynical, passive Americans who were born here and sit in gloomy silence, that fighting for justice is indeed worthwhile, and that no human life is unlawful.

Yes, it may be wrong to cross the border and live here without going “through the system”. But for too long, the US has treated Central America and the Southern Hemisphere as an underpaid labor and raw materials outlet, suitable only for exploitation and demanding silent complicity from the powerless.

Today those Spanish speakers are answering back in plain English. Millions of us will not like what we hear. But listening to these new voices may teach us respect, fear and perhaps admiration for the newest Americans.