City of Angels
May. 12th, 2006 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournI find LA a depressing city. I'm sure if I spent a week downtown in many American cities, I'd find them depressing too with the constant stream of homeless wandering the street--thank you Reagan for shutting down mental health support nationwide, dickhead--but LA in particular terrifies me.
The air quality is terrible. All week, the far side of the conference center is hidden in a haze and just walking outside makes your lungs itch. You can be in a car on a highway going 70-80 mph for hour after hour and see nothing but the same repetition of houses, commercial districts, and business buildings. That assumes you are driving at 3:30am on a holiday, because otherwise you are stuck in 5 hour gridlock twice a day. If anything stands as a warning to what the "Californian ideal" turns the world into if left unchecked, LA is it: urban sprawl, immensely warped economics, an ever-widening gulf between the have and have-nots, crime and gettos, a once beautiful landscape slowly (or not so slowly) turning to shit.
California was once considered a dream land of opportunity for immigrants, and it's now a Mecca to some of the worse aspects of American culture, slaves to the creed that says one can never be too rich, too famous, too thin, or too trendy.
I'm definitely looking forward to getting home.
The air quality is terrible. All week, the far side of the conference center is hidden in a haze and just walking outside makes your lungs itch. You can be in a car on a highway going 70-80 mph for hour after hour and see nothing but the same repetition of houses, commercial districts, and business buildings. That assumes you are driving at 3:30am on a holiday, because otherwise you are stuck in 5 hour gridlock twice a day. If anything stands as a warning to what the "Californian ideal" turns the world into if left unchecked, LA is it: urban sprawl, immensely warped economics, an ever-widening gulf between the have and have-nots, crime and gettos, a once beautiful landscape slowly (or not so slowly) turning to shit.
California was once considered a dream land of opportunity for immigrants, and it's now a Mecca to some of the worse aspects of American culture, slaves to the creed that says one can never be too rich, too famous, too thin, or too trendy.
I'm definitely looking forward to getting home.
