While most of you, my dear readers, don’t live here in LA I think there’s a lot to learn from other town’s local news. I sometimes buy tools from a company located in a small town in Maine. They use the local newspaper to cushion their packages. I always carefully pull out the packaging and reassemble the newspaper. The controversies of a small town I’ll probably never visit speak to the universality of the challenges we all face. And I especially like one of the quirks of this paper: a weekly column that consists of the stream of consciousnesses ramblings of the resident of a nursing home. You can learn a lot from listening to the voices of people and places outside your own bubble.

So what’s can you learn from my Los Angeles bubble? Imagine twenty years worth of corruption, brutal austerity measures, woke posturing and mismanagement packed into one completely bonkers week. Some of the high(low?)lights:

• The mayor opened up retail and restaurant service in the middle of a not-going-well pandemic with no notice.
• Police fired rubber bullets and drove cars into crowds of peaceful protesters.
• News that a city councilman paid off a mistress with money from a Chinese billionaire.
• Conflicting and contradictory curfew notices at all hours of the day and night.
• The suspension of all public transit with 40 minutes notice at the end of the day and the conversion of city buses into a network of improvised prisons.
• The mayor pledged not to call in the national guard and then, three hours later, called in the national guard.

That’s not even of fraction of what happened. You can hear a day by day breakdown of the craziness on episode 122 “Seven Days in Mayday” of an excellent podcast called, appropriately, LA Podcast. Even if you’re not a local it’s worth listening to because the problems here are everywhere in this country.