What it's Like
California in Shambles (Op)
In 1998, Whitey Ford released a song named What it’s Like which described the lives of a few chaotic characters common to what the House of Pain rapper saw throughout the streets in his life. A homeless man, a pregnant young woman, and a wannabe gangster were shown in the hardest points of their lives and sympathetically summarized to the audience. Almost thirty years later, the song still holds relevance to the lives of the everyday American.
In California, it isn’t uncommon to see a dirt riddled man with unkept hair wandering the streets begging for money. It also isn’t strange to watch as people walk by and ignore this man with disdainful looks plastered across their faces. The callousness of seeing poverty everyday has seeped so far into our culture that we no longer expect to see change, even though we hope and pray it does. Our leaders continue to make promises to fix these issues if only they could take another nickel here or another dime there, but the problem persists. At a time when the greatest need for compassion and caring for our people brimmed, we turned away and gave chaos and suffering free reign. We have left the poor to suffer and to build their beards full of mange by ignoring their plight and focusing our worries at arguments of politics and conversations over who is the most oppressed.
We can watch as young women flock to the doctor for help in their hardest hours. At the same time, we call for promiscuity from one pulpit and purity from the other, we ignore the reality of the people caught in the middle. In the 1990’s, our young women were fed culture and counter culture concepts and told to decide for themselves. Some dove head-first into the idea that all abortions are murder, while others sprinted to the idea that life began after going through the birth canal. Instead of listening with love and understanding, we put young soon to be mothers in the middle of a fire squad of judgement from both sides. With forgiveness and mercy, and an eye towards the future, our mothers from every background deserve to be regarded as people and not political pawns to be moved about at the discretion of an election.
Finally, we meet the gangsters roaming the streets trying to get ‘fat stacks’ selling drugs. It isn’t the 90’s anymore so you likely won’t see Max throwing his shows over the telephone wires to show he’s got something for you to buy, but the neighborhoods haven’t changed all that much. With marijuana legalized and fentanyl becoming the new drug of choice to peddle, and new state sanctioned gangs added to the mix, the dangers have only intensified. Rival gangs aren’t really shooting each other anymore, and with the defunding of police and the constant demonizing of any self-defense, our tragedies have moved from ‘the streets’ to the schools. Riots during the lockdowns and roaming gangs of looters throughout the largest cities still happening frequently have pushed even the most anodyne of citizens to fear walking the streets.
It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. Riots in the 90’s looked an awful lot like the riots in the 2020’s, with a little different tune. BLM looked a lot like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, but marching to a different beat. The tiki torcher holding white supremacists looked at a lot like the torch carrying mobs of the Jim Crow era. We may not know what it was like to live through a country that is breaking apart, but we are learning to know what it’s like to live in one that already has.