US AGAINST THEM : Native Sons and Daughters of Los Angeles, Unite! Together, We Can Spread the Truth.

It’s 3:15 in the morning and the lines on my computer screen are blurring, but the anger, uncorked, will not subside until I type these words.

Ever hear something vaguely condescending a hundred times and let it go again and again until the outrage dawns on you? It dawned on me a few hours ago. Somebody I met asked me where I was from.

“Here,” I said.

“No, I mean originally,” she said.

“Here in L.A.!” I said.

And then it began, as it so often does: Oh, a native ! Like I was an endangered species. Like I was a colonialized savage. Like I was a quaint artifact, allowed to remain here to make life more interesting for newcomers.

Fellow natives, particularly those who have lived here 30 or 40 or 50 years, are you tired of being regarded as a rarity, a fluke, a freak? Just because you remember the orange groves, carhops at all the Bob’s Big Boys and Westwood Village when it actually was a village?

Somebody has to pull the ladder out of the garage, set it in the middle of Pershing Square, climb on top and cry for justice. We natives are tired of being minimalized, marginalized and trivialized. We are tired of the countless pundits from the far corners of America who come to “discover” Southern California as if it exploded from a test tube a few years ago. We are sick of the notion that nothing counts here but the entertainment business.

Brothers and sisters, stand up! Aw, man, look at that posture. You’ve been beaten down, haven’t you? Your self-esteem has been fractured by that claw-hammer cliche, the one that mocks you as the human equivalent of the condor and leaves you so insecure that you’re tempted to claim you’re from Bucks County, Pa.

I’ve got a surprise for you. We are not alone. In fact, we own this town. Last fall, the Los Angeles Times Poll telephoned 1,586 adults in Southern California and found out that 36% are natives--as many as the combined number of Southerners, Midwesterners and Easterners who live here. We’re twice the size of the group that immigrated here from Mexico, Central America, Asia and the Mideast.

Of course, we don’t live in Steve Martin’s Los Angeles, which is, as best as I can figure, a two-block stretch of Melrose Avenue or Venice Beach. No, we live, hidden, in places like Covina and Stanton and Pacoima and Downey. We seek no glory. We get up and go to work and come home. We do not move to Seattle the first time the going gets tough. We live through the droughts and the earthquakes. We suffer the freeways. We mock Metro Rail because we know that it will not work and that long ago we condemned ourselves to lives of solitary travel the same way we chose to build homes with big back yards instead of a network of first-class urban parks.

The pundits and the other newcomers who strain to find an Eastern-style power and social structure in our fine, crazed land cannot understand this. Read the words they write, brothers and sisters, and watch how their fingers cramp as they try to define us. Notice how the writers always interview transplants. They never talk to natives because they know what we’d say.

We’d say: Give it up! You will never define Southern California. There is no structure here. This place is like the universe, not to be understood by mortal minds. It doesn’t make literal sense. Its logic is nonverbal, wispy, beyond the grasp of the brain’s speech center. Its pieces fall together in a way expressed only with a tiny laugh of satisfaction.

We natives hold these truths to be self-evident, but since they can’t be put into words, they never make their way into print. The experts never understand, for example, the degree to which most people here exist not to demand or seize, but simply to be left alone. How else do you explain 19 years of Tom Bradley as mayor of Los Angeles? He demands nothing of us. He leaves us alone!

It’s 3:35 in the morning. The anger is washing away. I will forgive the slights. I will even forgive a former employer who once advised a recruiter to stop hiring Cal State Northridge types. My wife awakes, spies me at war with my laptop, mutters something and returns to sleep. She understands. She was born here.