Not On Our Beaches

There is a running joke in disaster movies lately, about how nobody cares if Los Angeles gets obliterated during an alien attack, or swallowed up because the Earth’s tectonic plates suddenly decide to shift a few thousand feet within a matter of days. After all, what would be lost around here—the culture is in New York and Chicago, the money is in Manhattan, the power in Washington D.C., and farms and livestock are spread out in between. Would the world miss Hollywood? Would anyone miss the traffic?

Some say that Los Angeles—unlike Japan and its citizens of collective-minded, non-looting, orderly, courteous folks—that L.A. couldn’t survive the same series of disasters that the Japanese just went through. Some say that Angelenos are too selfish, too independent to want to work together or sacrifice certain things in order to benefit the larger group. It would take forever for first responders to get anything done because they’d be too busy signing legal waivers that indemnify themselves from lawsuits, in case they infringe upon someone else’s “space” while trying to pull that same someone away from their burning Escalade parked in their overleveraged McMansion.

This is why I think Los Angeles is the SAFEST place to live when the almighty shit hits the fan. Just as God only places the greatest burden on those who are best equipped to handle it, that same God wouldn’t dare touch L.A. for that same reason. Even with the best weather in the world, the most resources available, and every single thing (sand, snow, ocean, mountains, amusement parks, In-N-Out drivethroughs) within arm’s reach, Los Angeles is still just a slight breeze (or an unpopular verdict) away from utter collapse. Hell, if we can’t even handle two straight days of rain, how are we supposed to cope with a tsunami?

And do I think we’ll get radiation poisoning from Japan? No, because any radiation cloud that forms over the Pacific Ocean would take one good look at our sewage-stained coastlines, our crane-infested docks, our half-plastic people, our pretentious love of sushi and our hot, sweaty, farty yoga, and that radiation cloud would take pity on us and leave us alone to mire in our own, uh, mire.

If you want to experience a natural disaster, go live somewhere else, where people don’t mind helping one another shovel snow from their driveways. Go where a high school kid is thankful to have a part-time job, and where a car, any car, is a cherished item that doesn’t get replaced every five years just because that color isn’t in fashion anymore. Go where a person’s last name is more important than his first name.

But if you want nothing to happen to you, stay right here. Nothing’s happening here. And even if it did, we probably wouldn’t notice it. And if, for some reason, it did bother us, there would probably be a pill, a procedure, or an iPhone app that would get rid of it.