1949. Two blocks from our house, I could catch the J car and ride it all the way downtown. Yellow cars. Red cars. Wiki, wiki, wiki through a city that worked.
My father was stationed at the federal building in those years, and we lived in an Okie immigrant community just south of LA proper. I was a boy with a bicycle and a three-mile ride to school every morning, past streets that were clean and safe, through neighborhoods that didn’t lock their doors.
Compton. Lynwood. South Gate.
Say those names now and watch people flinch. But then? They were places where families gathered on porches, where kids played until the streetlights came on, where the American dream wasn’t a punchline.
What rose in its place is something else entirely. A “filthy jungle” isn’t hyperbole anymore—it’s a news headline, repeated until numb.
This week: Diners at a sidewalk cafe on Melrose Avenue, 5 p.m., broad daylight. Two figures in hoodies, at least one gun. Security footage shows patrons frozen, hands visible, as pockets are checked and purses rifled. The kind of scene you’d expect in a failed state, not on a busy street in the second-largest city in America.
But this is what failure looks like. This is what happens when civilization stops defending itself.
The neighborhoods I rode through on my bicycle are now “seas of individual household fortresses”—every home paved over, walled up, defended like medieval landholdings against an enemy that never sleeps. Bars on windows. Cameras on every corner. Alarm systems that scream into empty streets.
This is not paranoia. This is adaptation to reality.
The sheriff of LA County—a jurisdiction larger than some countries—has expressed his anger. The police chief of LA city has expressed his anger. They point at Left politicians who have, in their view, destroyed civilized life with policies that prioritize the sensibilities of criminals over the safety of citizens.
Anger is cheap. Words are cheap. Press conferences are cheap.
What would “serious” look like?
It would look like prosecutors who prosecute. It would look like judges who sentence. It would look like police who police—not as occupying forces, but as the visible, credible presence that says: this street belongs to the people, not the predators.
It would look like the end of catch-and-release, the end of soft-on-crime mysticism that pretends accountability is oppression. It would look like a district attorney who understands that the first duty of government is to protect the governed.
It would look like a city that remembers what my father’s LA knew: that civilization is fragile, that order is hard-won, that the alternative to both is the law of the jungle.
There’s a reason we use that word—jungle. Jungles are places where the strong eat the weak, where rules don’t apply, where every creature looks after itself because no one else will.
Los Angeles didn’t become a jungle by accident. It became a jungle by design—a thousand small decisions, each one defensible in isolation, that added up to something indefensible.
Defund the police? The jungle approves.
End cash bail? The jungle applauds.
Decriminalize everything? The jungle sends thank-you notes.
And now, diners on Melrose Avenue learn the lesson that every civilization eventually learns: the price of safety is eternal vigilance, and the cost of negligence is blood.
He’s gone now, my father. But I can hear him clear as day:
“Son, a city that can’t protect its people isn’t a city anymore. It’s just a collection of scared individuals waiting for the next bad thing to happen.”
He’d look at the security footage from that cafe. He’d see the fear in those diners’ eyes. And he’d remember the J car, and the three-mile bike ride, and the city that raised its children instead of abandoning them.
Then he’d ask the question no one in power wants to answer:
The sheriffs and chiefs have expressed their anger. Good for them. Now let’s see something real. Let’s see arrests that stick. Let’s see streets that are safe. Let’s see a city that remembers what it means to be civilized.
Let’s see Los Angeles come back from the dead.
Because the alternative—more headlines, more fear, more fortresses—isn’t a city at all. It’s just a jungle with better weather.
