July 4th and the Renovation of America

Doesn't this scenario have a slight flavor of American post-9/11 agoraphobia?

You might be asking, how does staying in the "hood, i.e. symbolically west/east of Sepulveda, color the way we feel about being alive?

And what does this have to do with July 4th?

We can connect some dots from the tear down and rebuilding of Los Angeles to the dismantling and renovation of America itself.

Changes in American society are occurring constantly.

One quick example is the computerization of friendship.

I don't remember public debates on this total change of social lifestyle.

If there had been a discussion, I imagine many of us would have said, "fuhgettaboutit", or as they used to say in the prehistoric Old Country, "feh" on that".

Now back to the July 4th game of questions.

Without putting too paranoid a spin on it, is America being destroyed and re-imagined by a handful of so-called "patriots" while the masses celebrate July 4th with beer and barbeque?

In what ways can we see this?

To reiterate, we in Los Angeles can see that we are enduring a marathon construction season.   There are orange road work cones and signs everywhere.

This is a physical bear trap we Lost Angels traverse in our battered, fancy tin cans, bumper to bumper, up and over ribbons of broken highways and potaholic roads.

What if America itself is under profound renovation, the systems of our lifestyle being ripped apart and replaced with a new future?

What if we are living through the chaos of a constitutional, national renovation, while personally distracted and without the benefit of obvious signposts to spell this out for us?

This is the start of what I hope will be a July 4th conversation.

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