The Orderkeepers
sweeping the ocean
Two blocks in Los Angeles, or a little less than two blocks. Maybe 90 seconds to walk between two points.
Little Tokyo is clean, safe, frequently busy but generally peaceful. It sits at the edge of Skid Row, and the two bleed together. Earlier this week, walking through Little Tokyo to reach Skid Row (because I don’t park my car on Skid Row), I heard a man shouting before I saw him: I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING BITCH, YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD, on and on, pushing a shopping cart and screaming threats at a person across the street who I didn’t get a good look at. In part, I didn’t get a good look at both parties to the stupid conflict because I wasn’t really paying much attention to it.
If you walk through Skid Row, 24/7/365, you’ll see many different versions of this outburst, constantly. BITCH I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU is the background noise of the place, like traffic sounds. Nick Shirley was here last year, and got some of the daily low-grade near-violent behavior on video. Constant threat displays, constant warning-off, constant squaring off, and a not-infrequent transition to the next step beyond display.
As the man with the shopping cart passed around the corner, I looked back and saw this:
A business was putting out tables to open for lunch. A woman was out with a broom, cleaning up, keeping order. There’s a stairwell to a parking garage just to the right of this courtyard that was covered with graffiti, smelling strongly of its alternative use as a bathroom. But there she still is, cleaning up.
Nearby, the other point on the map above:
Everywhere you go in the filthiest, shittiest part of the worst Democrat-run hellscape cities, you’ll see people cleaning and fixing things, against the relentless tide of ruin. Government-sustained disorder lives alongside a daily private effort to carve out livable spaces and moments of decency in the middle of aggressive, programmatic failure. The ruin is institutional and systemic; the resistance to failure is personal and individual, tens or hundreds of thousands of people who wake up every morning and sweep up around a business or a neighborhood.
The quiet struggle between these two forces never stops. If the people who try to keep some small degree of order give up, we’ll only have single-party government. We’ll only have Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. We’ll only have ruin.
I don’t understand how people keep trying in the face of this relentlessly imposed degradation. That’s the thing I’m going to start working on for a while. Why are there people who don’t give up on this manufactured ruin, this created and managed demoralization?
And why do people who fight the degradation tolerate what’s being done to them?
Or to ask the question this way, what happens between 2nd Street and 4th Street, between the peace and order of Little Tokyo and the degradation of Skid Row? How is that radical a culture change possible in so little space?
“Why are there people who don’t give up on this manufactured ruin, this created and managed demoralization?”
I don’t know much about LA, but maybe they do it because, goddammit, it’s their city too. Because they’re civilized.