Instead of building thousands of miles of highway barrier walls, we should have built a wall along the southern border.
Posted on 03/30/2008 7:18:08 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Los Angeles - Deep inside the bunker. Your erstwhile war correspondent clacks out another column on life as lived in America's second-largest city. That popping sound you hear in the background isn't the Orville Redenbacher or my stiff joints snapping as I stretch for one more M&M. That's the sound of sporadic small-arms fire, incoming rounds pinging off the new armor plating I have recently installed around my writing compound. It's called "defensive architecture," but I won't object if you find it offensive.
Big Bill Bratton, the politician's favorite cop, tells us crime is down; race has nothing to do with gang murders, and we can't "arrest our way out of the problem." So L.A. keeps stacking bodies like cordwood and sullying its name internationally with horrific headlines that sound more Karbala than Compton, Fallujah than Alhambra, Baghdad than Baldwin Park.
In desperation, urban planers have begun to incorporate ammo-resistant designs into new housing and public buildings. It's both pragmatic and pathetic.
If you're around my age, you may remember aluminum siding.
Instead of painting the house, you'd just hose it off once or twice a year. It looked great until one too many tennis balls thwapped into it, or dents from the extension ladder the old man used to clean the gutters left their dimples. After a while, your house looked like it had a bad case of cellulite.
Aluminum siding is a relic of the pre-Glock,
Mac 9, AK-47 San Fernando Valley of orange groves, sock hops, slingshots and BB guns. Today's L.A. is more interactive. Your home needs something tougher, Kevlar siding, something that can stand the onslaught of an army of domestic terrorists: Crips, Bloods, Avenues 43, MS-13, Latin Kings, Vineland Boys, 18th Street, whatever. Drive-by shootings have actually spawned a new school of urban planning, "defensive architecture." So move over Post-Modern, make room for Post-Moral. L.A. went from Bauhaus to crack house. From Art Deco to Art Ducko, as in hit the deck before a stray bullet hits you.
City Councilman Ed Reyes represents one of the most densely populated districts in the city, with as many as 66,000 residents per tract. He correctly asks, "What do we have to do so every time there's a backfire from a bad muffler they don't have to hit the floor...? How do we bring the parks back for families and kids?"
Part of the solution is Reyes' "defensive" designs for housing, pubic buildings and parks.
It's hard not to see the pragmatism. It's also hard not to puke. How pathetic that we've allowed gunfire to become so commonplace, we have to make buildings drive-by proof.
The Rio de Los Angeles State Park is a 40-acre oasis surrounded by the concrete and power-line sprawl of a city that's been guided by Darwinian planning. Reyes points to a 5-foot dirt hill lined with fencing, shrubs and trees for the explicit purpose of absorbing incoming rounds from San Fernando Road. While Los Angeles talks a big game about being the 21st century city, we're essentially reverting to moats and castles with a dot-com face-lift.
How does the clich go? "If you build a better mousetrap, someone builds a smarter mouse?" We're playing a game of cat and mouse with amoral killers.
The latest atrocity was the slaughter of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw Jr., a star footballer who caught the eye of top college recruiters. Tragically, he also caught the eye of an illegal-alien gangbanger who gunned him down while Jamiel's mother served in Iraq.
You can't make this up. The irony of fighting a war against terrorism half a world away while a generation of Angelenos is shot to pieces by local terrorists, while your own son is cut down at home.... Wow.
Smart people and good people may argue over the way out of this mess, but we'll continue to bury kids and wring our hands impotently until we agree on the basics: We have to salvage the next generation of gangbangers while crushing the current generation.
In the six months past, libraries have been shot up, Garfield High School torched, the copper wire stripped from hundreds of streetlights and a landmark Mid City statue was cut in two with a blowtorch and sold for scrap by scavengers. The barbarians are literally pillaging Los Angeles around the edges while we cheer on Eli Broad and the Grand Avenue boys. We've come so far we've circled back on ourselves. Back to the Middle Ages.
Meanwhile, child after child, young adult after young adult is quietly buried with an all-too-familiar chorus of tears.
Doug McIntyre hosts the "McIntyre in the Morning" program on Talk Radio 790 KABC, weekdays from 5 to 9 a.m.
If no FReepers are are long time listeners then I'm probably correct.
scary
Agreed!
Instead of building thousands of miles of highway barrier walls, we should have built a wall along the southern border.
“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, insure domestic Tranquility,......”
DECLARE ALL GANGS TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS AND BRING IN THE SPECIAL FORCES!
MacIntyre has the best morning drive show in LA, in that his show focuses on what’s happening in Los Angeles.
He’s a former TV sitcom writer, and is definately RIGHT of center on crime, local government waste, failed public schools, and the like. He is mayor Tony Villar’s (aka Villaraigosa’s) worst enemy, and routinely exposes him as the attention whore that he is.
Travis,
That is a NICE WALL! LOL
Where is that?
Kelly
Rome must have been like this in the 4th century.
Bury your assets deep, make good friends with the neighbors and, when possible, own the high ground.
Declare open season on any known gang member or drug dealer and put a $1,000 bounty on their heads. The problem will disappear in 60 days and the war on gangs and the war on drugs will be won.
Along I-10 from Riverside west there are a number of billboards warning against stealing it - big black and yellow signs.
Used to be strictly a Third World thing.
But of course, that's where LA went.
Anywhere in the USA that a freeway passes near a neighborhood. Just proving the point that we know perfectly well how to rapidly built high, strong walls anywhere we want to.
Too bad defending America from invasion was never considered worth doing.
Oh, okay.
Thanks.
But that is one NICE WALL! LOL
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
We need two things:
1) A Christian religious revival.
2) A Christian education available for every child in the U.S.
Do that and crime, murder, mayhem, and destruction will drop like a stone.
With today's technology, and inexpensive and excellent curriculum ( Thanks homeschoolers!) we should be able to provide every child in this nation a worldclass CHRISTIAN education! We must abandon the factory-like Prussian model school. With mini-schools, micro-schools, tutoring centers, homeschool cooperatives,,,etc. Christian conservatives could do this. If they wanted!
Will churches do this? NO!
Churches will NOT step up and do what needs to be done. They have too many government teachers, and those making a living off government schools, sitting in their pews. A minister is NOT going to bite the hand that feeds him.
Christians who care, will need to work outside of the framework of churches.
1) A Christian religious revival.
2) A Christian education available for every child in the U.S.
Do that and crime, murder, mayhem, and destruction will drop like a stone.
With today's technology, and inexpensive and excellent curriculum ( Thanks homeschoolers!) we should be able to provide every child in this nation a worldclass CHRISTIAN education! We must abandon the factory-like Prussian model school. With mini-schools, micro-schools, tutoring centers, homeschool cooperatives,,,etc. Christian conservatives could do this. If they wanted!
Will churches do this? NO!
Churches will NOT step up and do what needs to be done. They have too many government teachers, and those making a living off government schools, sitting in their pews. A minister is NOT going to bite the hand that feeds him.
Christians who care, will need to work outside of the framework of churches.”
With nearly everyone a church going Christian, I believe it would drop back to 1/100,000.
Whether he is left or right this article brings to mind the truth of the current statement “Our Diversity is Our Strength.”
Very good line, Ben.
Ping!
This is what you get when the borders are not controlled.
Just build a SWAT Team bunker station in every LA borough. Just like we do in downtown Baghdad. Then shoot the little $hits as they drive by firing. Take back our streets, and close the borders.
But before we do, have the LAPD take John McCain for a midnight ride in East LA.
Maybe then he will understand that he has to close our Southern Border. If not, make him get out and walk.
I left SoCal twenty one years ago, and stopped listening to talk radio ten years ago anyway, so I haven't a clue where this guy is coming from.
That doesn't really matter to me though since I believe his description of the end of LA as I knew it is valid.
How many gang members are there in LA? 60,000? Is ethnic cleansing of black civilians and gangsters by Mexican and Central American gangs taking place? My friends say yes.
Michael Frazier
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