Newsletter: These LAUSD musical instrument repair workers are the pride of Los Angeles

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023. Don’t look now, but “abnormally dry” areas have expanded (though are still only a tiny portion overall) on California’s drought monitor. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

I’ll begin with a quote, one uttered by a repair technician who helps service the 80,000 instruments used by Los Angeles public school students: “It’s not easy being a kid, but we try to make at least the playing the instrument part as good as it can be.”

That statement, by Dana Atkinson in the short documentary “The Last Repair Shop,” distributed by LA Times Studios, says a lot — about the struggles children in the Los Angeles Unified School District face, about the handful of people working without fanfare to brighten those children’s lives, and about the need to make light in a dark world. Before reading about the suffering and death overcoming much of humanity (and we’ll get to that), please click the link above and watch the 40-minute feature.

“The Last Repair Shop,” directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot, features four LAUSD employees who work in a downtown L.A. warehouse fixing the instruments used by students. In the film, those students tell of their love for music and the richness it brings to their lives, courtesy of these technicians. The documentary aired this week on Spectrum News 1 and was first posted on The Times’ Opinion homepage last month.

You can watch the film and see for yourself the passion and individual histories brought by these workers to their jobs. But I hope you also come away with something in short supply: pride in our city and in our public schools.

We have a school district that remains among the few to service instruments for students at no charge. I’ve been inside local classrooms, encouraging students who feel unheard to tell their stories to readers through The Times — and I’ve seen a spark in these kids that often gets overlooked by members of the public who know little about their public schools.

That spark shines through in this documentary, and I swell with pride knowing I live among taxpayers who help light that spark through public servants like these. As piano tuner Steve Bagmanyan said in the film: “When an instrument breaks, there’s a student without an instrument. No, no — not in our city.”

Also watch “Apayauq,” about the first known transgender woman to complete the Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska. That short documentary, directed by Zeppelin Zeerip, follows Apayauq Reitan as she competes in her second Iditarod — her first after coming out as trans — in her native Alaska. If watching Reitan mush a dog sled over 938 miles through snow and ice doesn’t give you chills, her remarks about what she wishes she could tell her 4-year-old self will.

The U.S. has fueled Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinians, and that war is a colonial one, says Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi: “Despite the unquestionable connection of Judaism and the Jewish people to the Holy Land, for Palestinians this is an anti-colonial struggle. Israel was established as a European settler colonial project — something none of its early leaders denied — with the indispensable assistance of British imperialism.”

These readers say the war and the existence of Israel have nothing to do with colonialism. This assertion, says one reader, “belittles the Jewish people’s ancestral ties to Israel and indigenous status there,” and it fails to acknowledge the “expulsion of more than 850,000 Jews from Arab lands and Iran after Israel’s establishment in 1948.”

I rode 23 miles to work on an e-bike and saw the transportation promised land. Since 2018 I’ve tried every possible shortcut and side street to cover the distance between my home in Alhambra and The Times’ newsroom in El Segundo. Driving typically takes an hour and a half, and riding Metro eats up two hours (even with recent rail improvements). Just recently I tried riding an electric bike to work, and I caught a glimpse of the transportation paradise that Los Angeles could be if its infrastructure better protected cyclists and pedestrians.

Kevin McCarthy quits Congress. It’s poetic justice for the Trump apologist. The California Republican who briefly served as House speaker won’t be missed by The Times’ editorial board: “McCarthy couldn’t manage the unruly conference and was deposed in October after a mere nine months in charge. His crime, according to the GOP hard-liners who orchestrated his downfall? Taking the kind of sensible action that Americans expect of their leaders. He’s no a tragic hero, though.”

More from this week in Opinion

From our columnists

• Jean Guerrero: Why Elon Musk, the bully, is seen by many, including liberals, as a hero
• Jackie Calmes: It’s about time Kevin McCarthy finally got out of the House
• LZ Granderson: Who cares about Billie Eilish’s sexual orientation?

From the Op-Ed desk

• Does Israel’s treatment of Palestinians rise to the level of apartheid?
• Gazans have no good options. Here’s the least bad of the bad
• Biden’s struggle among Latino voters is real. Here’s why and what he can do about it

From the editorial board

• Mayor Karen Bass kick-started more affordable housing in L.A. by cutting red tape. Now the council should make it the law
• CalPERS must ditch fossil fuel investments. Its new “sustainable” plan doesn’t do that
• No evidence for Biden impeachment inquiry? No problem. The House GOP doesn’t seem to care

Letters to the editor

• Your smart kid wasn’t the only perfect student rejected by Stanford or Berkeley
• Yes, Trump voters know they’re supporting a racist autocrat
• California punished home solar users. That’s not climate leadership