While selecting just 10 essays from the scores we’ve published this year is no easy task, the ones we’ve highlighted below reflect the best of Zócalo’s special, eclectic blend of ideas journalism with a head and heart. From a first-hand account of incarceration, to a case for how the global fight against authoritarianism can begin in your backyard, to even why, when feeling adrift, one might consider passage by container ship, here, in no particular order, are our staff’s favorite essays from 2022:

The Valley’s Last Camaro

San Fernando Valley aficionado Andrew Warren and automotive writer Tim Moore pen an ode to the last Camaro to leave the Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant before it closed in 1992. Today, the cherry red Z-28 lives on, serving as a time capsule to a bygone era of life and labor in the Valley.

Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant’s “Last Camaro” became a “memento of what that plant had meant to [workers] and their community,” write Andrew Warren and Tim Moore. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

How Horror Helps Your Brain

Mathias Clasen, director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark, studies why we’re drawn to the things that go bump in the night. “Recreational fear,” he explains, is a form of play behavior that prepares our brains to handle real-life horrors.

How the Kids Are Getting to All Right

As the youth mental health crisis worsened in recent years, young adult fiction writer Bree Barton decided to speak directly to young people to better understand the challenges they faced. For Zócalo and “State of Mind,” a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University, she shares what she learned—and the power that comes with letting tweens and teens shape their own narratives.

If You’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers Is Complicated

USC professor Natalia Molina’s relationship with Los Doyers has never been easy. As someone who grew up in the shadow of the ballpark, she reflects on Dodger Stadium’s dark history of displacing Latinx communities, and how she still finds community in the bleachers.

When the Public Narrative Fails

In a fractured nation, writer David L. Ulin finds consolation in literature. He explains why today, amid the breakdown of American consensus, writers provide lucidity: “In staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.”

With the collapse of society’s public narrative, writer David L. Ulin looks to literature for consolation. Illustration by Be Boggs.

How You Can Spot—and Stop—the Next Putin

With his column “Connecting California,” Zócalo’s Joe Mathews has tirelessly chronicled the inner workings of the Golden State for 10 years. Now, Mathews is introducing a second column, Democracy Local, exploring how everyday people, all over the world, govern themselves at the local level. The spirit of the column is embodied by this piece, which makes the case for why, amid the rise of authoritarian leadership around this world, you—yes, you!—can stop the next Putin-in-the-making.

How My Republican Grandfather Helped Legalize Abortion

Editor-at-large Caroline Tracey weaves personal and intellectual histories to highlight how an unlikely coalition came together in Colorado in the 1960s to support abortion rights. In her essay, Tracey considers the motivations behind the players in this fight for reproductive freedom—one of whom was her own grandfather.

Why Food Vendors Belong in the Prison Yard

Food sales “remain the closest thing to direct contact that C-yard inmates have with the community,” writes David Medina, an inmate at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, California. For the Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?,” supported by the California Wellness Foundation, Medina writes about how these sales have had a positive impact inside and outside of prison walls.

Where I Go: A Big, Slow-Moving Boat

In 2013, Elena Legeros quit her publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. Legeros shares how, out in the middle of the ocean, life aboard a container ship gave her “the space and time” to embrace herself.

What We Miss When We See the Plight of the Refugee

Our ongoing Zócalo/Mellon Foundation inquiry delves into complicated histories around the world, confronting the past in order to better understand it, and to forge paths forward. In response to the central question, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” political economist Mausumi Mahapatro draws on her work with Rohingya refugees in the world’s largest refugee camp, in Bangladesh, to highlight the social and political lives they carry with them and create anew.

Mausumi Mahapatra works in refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, which house close to 1 million Rohingya, like the woman photographed here. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2022 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You may not know anything about these two neighborhoods, which border each other in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. But if you’re a Californian, you should be familiar with the divide they represent—between those of us who live in the hills (or aspire to) and those of us who occupy the flatter precincts (and love them).

You don’t hear that much about this hillsiders-vs-flatlanders dynamic. Our media, elected officials, and intellectuals prefer to obsess about our big, polarizing divisions over politics, race, or gender. And when we discuss the fault lines within our political or cultural geography, Californians talk about the rivalry between north and south, or the differences between coastal counties and inland regions.

But the most intimate and important divides often lie within our hometowns, not between them. In California—a volatile and uneven place of mountains, valleys, and the canyons connecting them—our cities and towns often perch on slopes, putting hillsiders and flatlanders in close proximity, but somehow still in different worlds.

In most places, the hill people have more money, more privacy, and more power. The richest and most powerful Californians often make their homes in places whose very names broadcast their elevated status—Los Altos Hills, Beverly Hills, Del Mar Heights. And those spectacular views are not just about natural scenery; in California, our socioeconomic betters literally look down on us.

I found myself thinking about the hills-flatlands divide anew while watching the Netflix series Cobra Kai, which brings the characters from the 1980s Karate Kid films into California’s twisted present.

Almost everything has changed in the 30-plus years between the old films and new series. Community mores in the San Fernando Valley, where these stories are set, have become more inclusive. The demographics of karate-fighting teens have grown more diverse. And bullying—the central concern of these entertainments—has migrated online.

But what remains unchanged, and unbroken, is the line between the lovely hills of Encino and the rougher precincts of Reseda’s flatlands.

Back in 1984, when The Karate Kid premiered, the main character, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), lived with his mother in a shabby Reseda apartment, didn’t have a car (his mom’s would barely start), and struggled to survive in a high school full of rich Encino kids, including his bully and karate rival Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). In Cobra Kai, the characters have crisscrossed the hill-flatlands line, though the line itself endures.

Daniel, now the Valley’s most successful car dealer, lives with his gorgeous wife and entitled children in a Mediterranean-style Encino mansion. Johnny, having spent the ensuing decades drinking and drugging himself into a middle-aged stupor, is a handyman who lives alone in a dark Reseda flat. The awakening of this Gen-X Rip Van Winkle (Johnny doesn’t know how to use the internet, and 1986’s Iron Eagle was the last movie he watched on TV), and his ham-handed efforts to deal with people on the Encino side of the line, give the show’s predictable plot lines a comedic, class-centric bite.

While Cobra Kai is mostly shot in Atlanta for economic reasons, it accurately reflects Encino-Reseda realities. Encino, population 44,000, is wealthier (median income of about $85,000), whiter (80 percent), older (average age north of 42), and less dense than the city of Los Angeles, of which it is a part. Reseda, population around 80,000 and also in the city, is average in wealth (median income around $60,000), younger (average age 32), and more ethnically and racially diverse (with a slight Latino majority) than Los Angeles overall. It has twice the population density of Encino (and a COVID-infection rate twice as high).

There is a political divide between the two. Encino is part of a city council district that includes hyper-rich neighborhoods on the other side of the hill, like Bel Air and Beverly Crest. Reseda is in a Valley-only council district that includes Canoga Park and Winnetka.

Reseda is lucky to have separate representation. Many California cities elect council members “at large,” meaning they could come from anywhere in town and represent the entire city—a setup that has led to overrepresentation of wealthier hill people in local politics. That’s one reason why, in recent years, lawyers have used the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 to pressure more than 100 cities and more than 200 school districts to switch to district elections, so that no neighborhood can produce all the elected officials.

There’s other good news for us flatlanders, all across the state. With California’s hill communities controlled by NIMBYs, our flatland neighborhoods are more dynamic, and thus more likely to support new housing, new entertainment, and new transit options. (Yes, our—I’ve spent my life in the flatlands because I’m afraid of heights and mudslides, and because I’ve never forgotten the Lethal Weapon 2 scene where Mel Gibson used his pickup truck to drag a bad guy’s mansion down from the Hollywood Hills.)

Reseda Rising, a $100 million-plus investment project spearheaded by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, has already begun to transform the long-neglected Sherman Way corridor. Plans include an ice skating and roller rink (in partnership with the National Hockey League’s L.A. Kings), a new park and expanded bike path connected to the L.A. River, and the restoration of the Reseda Theater (you see its marquee at the beginning and end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 epic film about the Valley and pornography, Boogie Nights).

Walking and driving around the two neighborhoods on a recent weekday, I didn’t see any kids doing karate, but I couldn’t miss the contrast. Encino felt quiet and empty, its older people sequestered in their homes, while younger Reseda was bustling along Reseda Boulevard and near the Metro Orange Line, a popular rapid bus route. While snacking on delicious La Michoacana Mexican Ice Cream, I walked down Victory Boulevard between White Oak and Lindsay—the literal border of the two neighborhoods—and noticed the physical wall (to combat traffic noise) on the Encino side of the street.

I can understand why some Californians prefer the security of our state’s wealthy and leafy Encinos. It can feel good to peer down on Oakland from the Berkeley Hills, or lord over San Pedro from your Palos Verdes estate. And the relative emptiness of hillside communities is particularly appealing in the pandemic.

But once we’ve controlled COVID’s spread, I suspect that California’s Resedas will be more attractive to most of us. They’re more walkable, more affordable, and more approachable places, where it’s easier to make new friends, even if you don’t know karate.

The post In California, Hillsiders and Flatlanders Live in Close Proximity but Different Worlds appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can Californians rise from horrific local circumstances to national influence?

Two recent books offer one answer: It may help to have grown up amid the racism and institutional failures of Los Angeles in the 1990s.

The two books are both popular and compelling memoirs from African-American women and Southern Californians now in their 30s. But the authors are very different people. One is the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a deeply serious activist whose memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, quotes Nelson Mandela and Emma Goldman. The other is the TV and movie star Tiffany Haddish, a profane comedian whose memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, offers an excruciating exegesis of discovering a sex tape of her boyfriend and his mistress—and that the video time stamp is her birthday.

But, in distinct ways, the women show how to turn the pain of Los Angeles into national power. In their telling, the worst of L.A.—its discrimination, neglect, and public agencies so awful that they were taken over by other governments—helped forge strong identities. And the best of L.A.—its diversity—taught them how to speak to the broadest audiences.

Both women learned bitter and useful lessons in the San Fernando Valley. Khan-Cullors recalls growing up in a Section 8 apartment in a poor, mostly Mexican-American corridor of Van Nuys, where takeout restaurants pass for community anchors. “Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient,” she writes. Haddish was a South L.A. kid, but she rose daily at 5 a.m. to ride a school bus to Woodland Hills.

Both are from families that fell out of the middle class during the deindustrialization and recession of the 1980s and ’90s. Khan-Cullors’s mother is abandoned by her parents when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, and one of Khan-Cullors’s fathers loses his job at the Van Nuys GM plant and never quite rebounds. Haddish’s mother is a postal service manager and property owner who is never the same after suffering major injuries in a freeway accident.

In the Valley, both must reckon with wealthy white people who are unaware of their privilege. Khan-Cullors goes to a Sherman Oaks school, where she makes a friend whose father turns out to be the slumlord who won’t repair her family’s apartment. She is arrested inside her classroom at age 12 (while the school’s white teenage drug dealer goes free). “That was the year I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready,” she writes.

Haddish, also attending schools with wealthy whites, decides not to be ignored or insulted, but to emphasize, even with clothing (“poor as f—k chic”) how she’s different. This makes her popular. She also seizes the opportunity, developing a steady business providing dancing and entertainment at bar mitzvahs.

Both women give credit to their Los Angeles Unified public schools. Khan-Cullors recalls how teachers and classmates at Cleveland High introduced her to concepts of social justice. Haddish enjoys the social life at El Camino Real High (she serves as El Conquistador, the school mascot), and a teacher there helps jump-start her academically—to the point that New York University offers her admission (though not enough money for her to attend).

But outside of school, both learn the lesson that L.A. doesn’t really care much about the lives of its kids—especially black, poor ones.

Khan-Cullors watches her friends get harassed and arrested for nothing more than minor acts—tagging, underage drinking, cutting class, talking back, and, in one case, wearing the same T-shirts. She sees how the drug war, the “three strikes” law, and Prop 187 injure friends and acquaintances. And she is particularly angry at how gang injunctions are used to label kids even when they have nothing to do with gangs. “Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us,” she writes.

The book is particularly powerful—and infuriating—in recounting how Khan-Cullors’s brother, Monte, a schizophrenic, is charged with progressively more serious crimes (“I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested”), even though he doesn’t physically harm anybody. Monte is beaten, tortured, and drugged in the L.A. County Jail during a time when, subsequent investigations showed, such abuse was a regular practice of the county sheriffs.

Khan-Cullors fights to protect her brother from institutions that treat him as disposable. The line to her eventual activism is clear: Wouldn’t Monte have received the care he needed, rather than abuse and incarceration, if all black lives really mattered?

In Haddish’s memoir, it is the author herself who suffers the abuse. This fact—and Haddish’s comedic instinct to make herself, not others, the butt of jokes—gives her funny book unexpected pathos. She is beaten by her mother, as well as in the foster care system, in which she spends her teens. She describes the indignity of having to beg a judge—since she had no official parent and was a ward of the state—to seize an early opportunity to appear on television.

“It didn’t feel like anybody gave two f^*ks about me, unless it was benefiting them. Unless they was getting paid,” she says, recalling that her grandmother insisted on being compensated for a stint as her foster mother. “Me just being myself was never good enough for anyone to love me.” She falls into difficult relationships with men—some of them cops to whom she is drawn because of the illusion that they provide safety. “I end up picking jealous and possessive guys, because in some sick, twisted way, I think that means they care,” she writes.

In the face of awful realities, both women conclude they have little choice but to assert themselves. Khan-Cullors builds a commune of activists and artists, defying police raids. She helps organize the first Black Lives Matter march, strategically held in Beverly Hills, to gain broad notice. She finds that having had to navigate the many different peoples of L.A. allows her to build diverse alliances—and to make Black Lives Matter a truly democratic organization. Perhaps it’s easier to be intersectional if you’re from a city with so many intersections.

“We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just,” she writes, noting that her own name remains little-known. “This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit.”

Haddish has to fight racism and sexism as she breaks into comedy, with only a day job at an LAX ticket counter for support at first. She is cheated and propositioned by producers. But she is lucky in that her unlucky childhood has made her fierce and uncompromising. In 2017, she breaks out in the film Girls Trip, and by this spring, she was a presenter at the Oscars. Toward the end, Jada Pinkett Smith, alongside her husband Will Smith, hilariously enters the narrative playing Henry Higgins to Haddish’s Eliza Doolittle, who needs to be cleaned up so she isn’t “too street” for stardom.

Ultimately, both books make the same timely point: You can’t negotiate or compromise with people or places that discriminate against you. The best you can do is confront that discrimination—and use that experience to build your voice.

As it happens, that is also a strong point in the USC sociologist Manuel Pastor’s new State of Resistance, the best book so far about California in the age of Trump. Pastor argues that the story of California of the past 20 years is how younger Californians, many of them immigrants and minorities, got tired of being victimized. After realizing that complaining doesn’t work, they built institutions and alliances (Black Lives Matter among them) that have protected immigrants and other at-risk people—and took over state politics in the process.

Black Lives Matter and its allies are often criticized as advancing “identity politics.” That’s backward. Khan-Cullors and Haddish each show how forging a strong identity—even through suffering—can allow you to advocate for universal values. The power is in the pain.

“That’s why my comedy so often comes from pain,” Haddish writes. “In my life, and I hope in yours, I want us to grow roses out of the poop.”

The post The Pain of Surviving the San Fernando Valley Can Make You Powerful appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I never dreamed I would ever say these words. I grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles in the 1970s, and the part of L.A. where we lived was alive with entertainment and arts. Although I attended Catholic school in uniform each day, at night I’d go to concerts to hear undiscovered musicians who would soon become superstars, and on weekends I’d attend protests against the Vietnam War and in support of the United Farm Workers. There was a beach for picnics and surfing, mountains nearby, Hollywood just down the road, and oh, if you drove over the hill, that San Fernando Valley.

The Valley was the sensible sibling to the happy-go-lucky L.A. I lived in. I knew it as the place where factories such as Anheuser-Busch were located, and where you’d find hard-working, conservative people. If a friend announced she was leaving school to live in the Valley, it was the same as if she’d said she had a terminal disease.

I come from a long line of circus performers, and the rule that was enforced most strictly in our family was that we were always to share. Life in the circus often involved people giving one another a hand: If you have something, you always have enough to share with someone else. This was law to my parents—and it is second nature to me. I grew up thinking everyone was that way, and it was difficult to discover it wasn’t true. This is part of why I’ve felt the need to share arts with students as well as the communities I live in.

Fifteen years ago, I married into the Valley. My husband already owned his home in Canoga Park, so I moved in. Even though it was just over the hill, it seemed like an alien planet. I knew L.A. like the back of my hand, but here, I couldn’t find anything, didn’t know the streets, and had no friends—it was stressful.

I had been making mosaics since I was 6 years old, teaching art in L.A. schools and showing my own work around Southern California and the world, but for the first time, I had to work to join a community. One day, about two years after I’d moved to the Valley, I was looking under the “Community—Artists” category on Craigslist when I saw that there was going to be an opening for local artists at the Madrid Performing Arts Theatre. I live six blocks from the Madrid, so I called up the theater and spoke with the director—Denise Leader-Stoeber, the woman who would become my best friend. In the course of our conversation, it came up that I drew murals at chalk festivals. Denise said to me, “We are having a big Dia de los Muertos Festival. Can you bring some artists to draw?” I showed up three weeks later, with 40 chalk artists, and got everything, from food and chalk to prizes for the artists, donated. This evidently qualified me for the board of the Canoga Park Dia de los Muertos Festival, which I have been part of for the last 13 years.

Joining the Dia de los Muertos Festival board opened doors, and I began to meet people and get involved in the Valley. I volunteered for various activities, such as leading children’s art workshops and working with at-risk kids in our local Jeopardy anti-gang program with the LAPD. I also started organizing arts and crafts events for people of all ages that create community—where we’ll do things like create a picture frame out of donated tile and glass.

About a year ago, I participated in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program “Grand Souk” market event, where I displayed and sold my art. Through my involvement, I met Carolyn Uhri, the director of the San Fernando Valley Arts Council. We hit it off, and she invited me to a luncheon with the Council. I realized it wasn’t a very big group at all—and that I could be a part of bringing this once-active organization back to life. Over the next few months, I got more involved—but it became clear that there was really no hope in building the Council back to be what it was, or what it could be. Carolyn agreed, and we wanted to make a fresh start, so we founded what has now become the San Fernando Valley Arts Alliance. We are currently under the umbrella of the California Art League and hope to be an independent nonprofit by next year.

Since then, I have been recruiting artists to become part of the Valley Arts Alliance and getting involved with local schools. I’m currently working on a program called “6 X 6 X 6,” where we install six murals by six artists that are six-by-six feet for $6,000 at a local school. We have completed murals at two schools and are now signing up new schools for the fall.

As Carolyn and I became closer friends, we often discussed how there were many arts organizations in the Valley, but there was no brick-and-mortar place where artists could come and meet, exhibit, learn, or share. We started making plans for the San Fernando Valley Arts and Cultural Center.

A person who is truly dedicated to a cause for the right reasons is a force to be reckoned with; two people with the same vision are unstoppable. Carolyn had been looking for a location for the Center for nearly four years. About six months ago, she finally found a place: a 4,500-square-foot space in an industrial building on Oxnard Street in Tarzana. This meant we really had to step it up—and raise the money to lease the space. We’d stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m. talking about how to make the Center happen, and we didn’t give up. We approached our city councilmembers for funding but didn’t get anywhere, although one of them offered his support, as did our mayor. Eventually, we got a loan from a private donor, signed the lease last month, and have started build-out. Not bad for five months.

When it is finished, the San Fernando Valley Arts and Cultural Center will have two workshop spaces, with a moveable door that can be opened if more space is needed. It will be a place for our local opera company, our children’s theatrical group, and poets, photographers, and visual artists to meet—and for the public to know there is a place where they can be found. It will be a common location for workshops, exhibitions, rehearsals, and performances. It will also house an archive that lists murals and public art throughout the Valley. Carolyn and I envision the Center as a place to congregate and celebrate ideas, and where people can always come to view new and exciting pieces of art created by local artists.

As president, Carolyn will continue to guide how the Center works and runs on a day-to-day basis. As for me, I am the director of public art, where I’ll continue to be responsible for the “6 X 6 X 6” program and for other projects that make the Valley a more beautiful place, like a fountain restoration we’re doing at a local college. This means I’ll have a smaller role in the operation of the Center, but that’s fine with me. We are growing, and I love making things grow—and I will always be able to look back and know that I helped make something of quality and service happen. It will make me smile, till the next thing comes along.

The post Becoming a Valley Girl appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But these days, I am also smitten by the “new” Los Angeles that is emerging in the Arts District (a much different “Arts” from the Valley’s “Art’s”) in downtown Los Angeles. In the past decade, the community has grown five-fold, from 10,000 to 50,000, largely hidden from the Los Angeles that most people know. My favorite haunt there is The Daily Dose (1820 Industrial Street, near the famous Church and State restaurant).

The Dose is a small, sequestered gem, hidden in a bended, ivy-covered-brick-walled alley that offers patrons the feel of a café in Italy–never mind the warehouses nearby that distribute large amounts of California’s produce. I find The Dose to be an invigorating place, almost magical. The food is all grown locally and overseen with great care by proprietor Sarkis Vartanian, a warm and generous fellow who does a lot to hold this emerging downtown community together.

In his idyllic hideway, you’ll meet regulars such as Ping Ping and Rabbit. Ping Ping is a young Beijing-born designer of artsy leggings that she creates a scant few blocks away and sells online to customers from Brazil to Bulgaria and beyond. Rabbit is an artist who makes furniture and also, happens to be the grandson of a former L.A. police chief. Or you might also come across Pace, who, by virtue of Groupon, conducts exciting cooking classes in her loft when she isn’t filming cooking shows there for various cable outlets. Ernie is an Ivy-League-educated Native American tribal lawyer for a prominent Southern California tribe who juggles her defense of Native American rights with her new Native American clothing line. (Check it out at Avelaka.com).

At Dose, a daily homage to a Chandleresque L.A., you will also meet the Chicago architect who bought a turn-of-the-century firehouse seeking to convert it into a high-end restaurant, and many others creating and innovating the next big thing, off the traditional business community’s grid.

The place is a microcosm of our larger community, a magnet for restless, innovative, and creative spirits from all over the planet that never cease to inspire. Creativity. Imagination. Reinvention. Such is the intoxicating mix of my beloved L.A. I relish my daily dose.

Robert Hertzberg is a former speaker of the California Assembly, co-founder of g24 innovations, a solar company based in the United Kingdom, and the co-chair of California Forward.

*Photo by Robert Hertzberg.

The post The Daily Dose appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Part subway, part bus, the Orange Line is a mutant in the world of public transportation that runs a 14-mile route from Warner Center to North Hollywood. It’s a bus, all right. It lugs 60 or so passengers at a time to and from the Valley in its longer-than-usual belly. But it’s also a subway, gussied up in silver and gray like all Metro trains, and named after the Valley’s former carpet of citrus trees. Like all subway cars gunning their engines with impunity, it coasts on its own dedicated road, unrestrained by the traffic that chokes the regular lanes.

So if the Orange Line is a chimera of transportation, that makes me one of the brave adventurers willing to ride the beast. But it doesn’t take much courage to ride–in fact, the experience is much more pleasant than either a subway or a bus, not to mention my car. Unlike subway cars that ride in the deep, dark wombs of the city, the Orange Line sails along in the sunshine. If I’m lucky enough to get a window seat, I can see the cars stop and start alongside the bus, hampered by traffic lights as we cruise. As the bus coasts from one stop to the next, I see the trees from nearby Lake Balboa Park and joggers and bikers making their way in the morning sun.

Often, I ride the bus alone on the way downtown to interview someone for a story or to come in for my part-time job. (I’d rather not find parking, thank you). A petite, non-threatening woman with an evidently friendly disposition, I often become a prime target for casual conversation. Sometimes, it’s eye-opening, like when a fellow passenger told me about the post-production house that exists just to turn 2D movies into 3D; other times, not so much. On the Orange Line, where almost everyone is heading toward the Red Line terminus in North Hollywood to switch to a downtown-bound train, people often are in for a lengthy ride.

On my half-hour ride I’ve come across a woman reading my magazine over my shoulder (she works for L.A. Mart downtown), a man happy to give me tips on how to buy a foldable bike (he proudly showed off his own) and a woman who must have been a preacher in a past life.

I met the last character while jostling for a seat on the bus. She was a large African-American woman, dressed in an all black jogging suit. On her lap was an open notebook–perhaps a journal. She seemed engrossed in her thoughts. Her head pivoted back and forth from the window to her notebook, in turns musing and writing, I suppose. Seeing no other place to sit, I asked her, “Is this seat taken?” To which she replied, squeezing her large frame closer to the window, “Of course not, cher. You don’t even have to ask.”

As we rode, she scribbled notes her weathered notebook. Then she flipped her phone open and began what a conversation that would last the whole ride. “I just realized I need my life to change …” she related to the stranger on the other line.

She then proceeded to talk in Oprah-esque sound bites. “I feel the need to change my life. I have so much to give inside me.” I wondered if I had inadvertently sat beside an all-too-common muttering lunatic, but as I surreptitiously listened to her gospel I did start to see sense in her madness. “Everybody’s arguing. Everyone’s protecting their own piece of the pie. Nobody gets it, but we’re all just people living in one world.”

As she said those words, I averted my gaze from her and rested my eyes on the busload of people squeezing this way and that, all trying to get somewhere. I thought, “She isn’t so crazy after all.” Ensconced as we all were within the confines of the silver-grey bus, we were all part of the bigger picture–a picture all too easy to lose sight of in the age of getting what we want, how we want it, when we want it. It’s even easier to forget my own relationship to the whole when I’m zipping in and out of freeway lanes alone in my car.

A ride on the bus for me is many things. On the Orange Line, it can be a ride through history itself, as the lumbering bus travels over the same roads the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Electric Red Car once did. It can be a reminder of how inextricably tied we all are to each other, as the woman taught me, or it can simply be a time for quiet reflection on the way home after a long day.

As I made my way home from work on a westbound Orange Line one evening, it seemed as though the bus was chasing the setting sun. I had the perfect seat to see the sky turn from velvety blue to dark purple tinged with orange and pink, then a deep black blue hue interrupted by winking stars. It’s unexpected inspirations–like wannabe-Oprah’s surprising wisdom or that  rich tapestry of colors during the sunset–that make me glad I hadn’t taken my car. I might have been home in a fraction of the time, but I would have missed the world around me.

Carren Jao is a freelance art, architecture and design writer based in Los Angeles.

*Photo by Carren Jao.

The post My Clockwork Orange appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.