We can't fix society until we fix the schools. We can't fix the schools until we fix the neighborhoods. We can't fix the neighborhoods until we fix the economy. We can't fix the economy until we fix politics. We can't fix politics until we fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities. We can't fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities until we fix society. We can't fix society until we fix the schools.

You cling to culture like an orphan drags her rag doll from foster home to foster home. It is your last soiled reminder of what you think you were. You'd rather die at the stake than adapt or evolve because change is scary. So you guard the same tired shit as if it's a precious, sacrosanct relic from the holy crusades of your ancestors when, in fact, it is a withered turn wrapped in butcher paper.

Now personally I stand for the National Anthem. But that a man refusing to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner is a greater affront to your sense of American honor than a stacked roster of flag-waving hypocrites using Old Glory as a symbolic excuse to commit untold atrocities at home and abroad is probably a good sign that you've lost all reference.

Ours isn't a perfect world. It's downtown--a gilded toilet where people defecate in the streets, where untreated crazies run amok, where Business Improvement District dispatchers get stabbed in the back, where residents gleefully attend midnight arson, where cars pin people to walls, where tourists disintegrate in water tanks, where old men get beaten to death outside their apartments.

Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.

The American people have a nasty habit of waiting until it's far too late to start giving a shit. By and large, your average eligible voter tunes in to politics once every two or four years because they have been scared, shocked, bullied, cajoled, stimulated, seduced, suckered, or outright fear fucked by one or more extremities of the hideous mutant that is our electoral process.

If you want to do something today to radically improve the United States of America, walk on the right.

Americans can afford to disregard 'thou shall not kill' and 'thou shall not covet.' We sidestep 'blessed are the meek' and 'blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness.' We dance around the particulars of 'again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' as we change money in this earthen temple.

Mostly, we swaddle ourselves in the sacrilege of self-justification and kowtow to a God we have silently rechristened ego. All things are acceptable in the all-seeing eyes of self-interest. Within the walls of our flimsy Jericho, we court ruin.