It would be wonderful, as some readers advocate, to report on more happy local events, such as smiling families, freshly painted houses, award winning rose gardens and the best pho in Van Nuys. I could spread joy talking about the opening of a new Hawaiian BBQ on Sepulveda across from LA Fitness. Maybe there is a new car wash to praise.
But the urgent business of blight calls me to blog.
We live in a unique time in Los Angeles, one that features a continuing garbage festival of debris that comes, like an incurable virus, upon our neighborhoods, and stays for weeks and months, maybe even years, a homeless caravan of disorder which our city council, our mayor and other elected officials are powerless to stop.
Reader Wendy Hernandez-Zepeda lives near the Big Lots store on Wynadotte St. and Sepulveda Blvd. and she sent me some photos of the shopping carts, the garbage, and the illegal dumping that blights her neighborhood.
“Hi there! Can you help? We have been dealing with this for more than a year,” she wrote.
She sent me these ugly photographs, ugly not because she is a bad photographer, but ugly for what they contain, and the degree to which they depict how our city has fallen under Mayor Garcetti (“Garbageciti”), a smiling hologram of political correctness, who seems to be visiting another city and another country every month of the year, and regularly trots out his 23 and Me diversity by claiming to be made of the same genetic ingredients as the five top ethnic voting blocks in Los Angeles.
I told Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda to report this to that app, My LA 311, and she explained that she has, but nothing has been done to correct the garbage festival on her community sidewalk.
My take on the homeless issue is that tolerance of it creates more of it.
When you allow, by law, using public sidewalks and public parks and public ways for the unlawful and unsanitary life of vagrancy, you send a message, broadcast around the world, to come to Los Angeles and camp out.
How is it that the lawless make the laws and the law abiding must accept that? There is not one valid or moral or medical excuse for human beings sleeping in alleys, on bus benches, and wandering the streets pushing shopping baskets.
Yes, it’s painfully true that housing is expensive, but it does not explain why the city of Los Angeles and the State of California have not jumped into emergency mode and created sanitary, safe, abundant housing for people who are temporarily displaced.
What we have, instead, is weak and pathetic leadership which panders to disorder, decay and barbarism, and refuses to use all power to end this continuing monstrosity of un-civilization going on all around Los Angeles.
There is nothing I can tell Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda other than voting for someone who is not Eric Garcetti in the next election.
Here in Van Nuys 
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