February 19, 2002

Febraury 19, 2002

Clouded Futures and Distorted Pasts


I was driving down California Highway 395 on my way back from Mammoth Lakes yesterday, and I saw two very disturbing sites:

1) The first was an historical monument at Manzanar, the site of a relocation center of World War II. Relocation center is a euphemism for internment camp. After an executive order issued in 1942 to intern Japaneese nationals or American citizens of Japaneese ancestry, more than 100,000 people were forced to relocate to one of the ten concentration camps that were eventually built. Manzanar, the first of of these camps, held over 10,000 persons behind barbed wire perimeters monitored by guard towers.

2) The second was a huge lakebed that was virtually dry. Apparantley, this valley just east of the Sierra Nevadas in the Owens Valley supplies a large portion of Los Angeles (100 to 200 miles to the south) city water. Over the last thirty years, this entire valley has been losing lake after lake to the unchecked consumption of Southern California.

These two sites were disturbing enough on their own, but justaposed next to each other they demonstrated an awful reality of the American psyche. It doesn't seem like America can deal with its past nor come to grips with its future. Although, its considered very Zen to live in the moment we Americans do this in a most perturbed way. We decide that we can ignore aspects of our past and impending future that cause us the slightest amount of discomfort.

We congratulate ourselves on our heroic protection of freedom during WWII, when we violated our own laws and the freedom of our own citizens, in one of the most racist and hysterical periods of American history. Its odd that racism always seems to become more acceptable to display and act whenever there is an 'enemy' of America. We never acknowledge our mistakes and we doom ourselves to repeat them and suffer.

We wash our cars and water our manicured lawns in the face of a crippling waters shortage that is less then 20 years away. And do we elect officials who could possibly avert the impending doom and present destruction by changing policies? No because these politicians will raise taxes in order to fund our water sources. We hire the guy who won't raise the cost of living one cent...regardless of what the living is going to be like. The sad thing is that L.A. is going to have to learn to get along without water or find and alternate source eventually anyway. The same problem is going to be staring us in the face in 20 years, but we will have completely dried out a region ten times bigger then LA County in the process, and we won't have a back-up supply of water to help us out while we try to implement a costly solution.

I wonder if we will ever wake from the American dreamstate we are in...