PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : ‘All of Us in Southern California, Like It or Not, Are Angelenos’

Nothing has changed in my neighborhood. The birds sing, the children play, the adults drive away to work every day. The Los Angeles riots were about as real as the Gulf War: It looked scary on television, and we may have had one or two friends or loved ones caught up in violence. But in the end, our dominant emotion was relief--relief that it all happened so far away.

This, in a way, is the unhappiest legacy of the tragedy. In large part, the riots occurred because most of us have walked away from Los Angeles and now pretend that it is not part of our lives.

Of course, flight from the inner city--both “white flight” and “black fight”--has been going on in America for 40 years. But the leave-it-behind attitude is constantly reinforced in all kinds of subtle ways, making it difficult to feel any kind of connection to other places. For example, to boost circulation in outlying areas, daily newspapers (including this one) compete to see which is most concerned about the local teachers’ contract or the local slow-growth initiative. Typically, such coverage is at the expense of an honest discussion of Los Angeles’ festering social problems--and their impact on us as citizens of the region.

When they wind up getting lumped with Los Angeles, the outlying areas recoil in horror and take desperate steps to undo the damage. So fearful was Ventura County of being a stepchild of Los Angeles in regional-planning schemes that county officials recently engaged in a kind of governmental white flight. They approached Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties about forming a tri-county, non-Los Angeles regional government of their own. But the overture was rejected. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that the other two counties had pretty much the same attitude about us that we have about Los Angeles, and thus don’t want to have anything to do with us. All of us in Southern California have become obsessed about protecting our own cocoons.

But those cocoons, while tightly wrapped, aren’t impervious, as we in Ventura County discovered when a jury of our peers acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of illegally beating Rodney G. King. Despite our best attempts to wall ourselves off from all the stuff we dislike about Los Angeles, we are now inextricably connected in the public mind with the city, especially with its poorest, bleakest neighborhoods: We are the racists who gave Los Angeles the match.

Of course, a lot of people around here don’t really mind the racist image; they believe that Los Angeles, like King, simply got what it deserved. For them, the riots to the south will provide another pretext to deepen the lines dividing the world into “us” and “them,” and to use geography all the more ruthlessly to separate the two.

There is a different lesson.

Suburbanites commonly believe that by getting into their cars and driving away from something they dislike, or fear, they can escape it. But the social problems we strive to distance ourselves from can get into their own cars and follow us. They can leap over our fences and sneak past our security guards. The more we ignore these social problems, the worse they will get, and the worse they get, the more likely they will affect us no matter where we live. Only the unwillingness of arsonists to drive over a couple of hills saved us.

Inner-city social problems can harm us in less obvious ways. Whether we in Ventura County like to admit it or not, the prosperity that most of us are blessed with rests, in one way or another, on Los Angeles’ global image as a healthy and manageable metropolis. And, as we have learned in the last 10 days, that image is shaped not only by people we think of as “us,” but by people we think of as “them.”

Ironically, in the short run, the L.A. riots will probably mean more prosperity for its suburbs. A new round of flight from the city will begin, with the fires stoked by greedy real-estate brokers and ambitious economic-development vultures. More virgin land will be chewed up to make room for the refugees and their jobs.

In the long run, it will hurt us all. The battered economic engine that fuels the region will struggle all the more to recover. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody in suburban New York. Flight from the city there has created local booms in Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, but the regions’ long-term decline has robbed almost everyone of a secure economic future.

Thirty years ago, President John F. Kennedy brought hope and solidarity to a walled-off city simply by uttering four words: “ Ich bin ein Berliner .” In the same way, all of us in Southern California must acknowledge that, like it or not, we are Angelenos. Our neighborhoods may be quiet, our air may be smokeless, but the tragedy played out on Los Angeles streets is going to affect us in a hundred different ways. We must peek far enough out of our cocoons to see that we are all connected to each other as citizens of this region.

It is unrealistic to expect most Southern Californians who lead peaceful suburban lives to make a major investment of time and money in the ravaged areas of Los Angeles. But it is not unrealistic to expect each of us to recognize that, no matter where we live, we have a stake in the smoldering neighborhoods far from our own, and in the lives of people we don’t ordinarily think of as “us.”