Another Option: Grow and Die

I’m sick of the movers and shakers who constantly aim to “promote” Orange County into the metropolis class, a luscious end-destination for all the world to head for.

Why have a barren, uncluttered mountain above us when we could look up at some beautiful, expensive homes whose residents could feel royal by looking down? Why go to Los Angeles to see a game when we could have a stadium in our own backyard?

There are people in this world, and in this county, who wouldn’t recognize true human success--and consequent happiness--if they got hit in the face with it. They always want more, need more; and they are always striving for their next “fix.” “Grow, or die,” they keep parroting.

Of course, how does an aesthetically sensitive person share a Pacific sunset with someone who sees in it a possible opportunity to make a bundle? For many of us, the continuous doling out, by developers, of little pockets of man-made nature in exchange for the deliberate death of the real thing just won’t cut it.

But, surely, the first time I saw three-piece suits walking around the “South Coast Metro” area, I knew Mother Nature was in trouble. Transplanted New York types can’t stand being alone; they’re conditioned to believe that Central Park is the great outdoors. Apparently, a few of them have decided to stay, thinking that, with a few minor adjustments, here could be almost as good as there, plus the weather.

So now, we have been given the Eastern solution to the California freeway: The toll-freeway. Exorbitant prices for even the “cheap seats” at artistic events, even paid admission requirements at “public” museums (what next, tickets to the library?).

And the solution to class resentment: more private luxury boxes in stadiums, often subsidized with tax money. Finally, the first of six Gateway Monuments, 26 feet tall, with a giant, spinning florescent orange sphere on top, illuminatingly saying, “Welcome to ORANGE COUNTY” in great big letters, and similar ones at strategic freeway entries into our sanctum, our refuge from the crassness of Los Angeles.

Please folks, get off your behinds and stand up to these nature exploiters. If you don’t, you’ll get exactly what you deserve: L.A. South.