City of Angels 2019-20

Hi everyone. Firstly, so sorry that this is later than it should have been, that's on me. Secondly, this isn't going to look exactly like blog posts that have happened in the past. In the first semester, I wrote a blog post about the impacts of not discussing wealth at a school like Poly, and the discussion that followed that was extremely interesting to me. For my expansion, I reached out to students at other schools, asked them questions about their experiences, and compiled it into a paper that ended up being way too long. After talking to Dr. Stogdill and, at the time, Ms. Gladden about what I should do about that, instead of editing what I had written we came to a conclusion that if I wanted I could continue this work into the second semester and use the blog post platform to get some input from all of you. I spent some time interviewing students from various different schools, but at a certain point, I hit a bit of a wall. I'm not going to make you read the whole pap...

This past week, we read Who Killed the Los Angeles River and learned about the turbulent and eventful story of the Los Angeles River. Most of the chapter seems like a critique of the way the government, flood management companies, and individual citizens seemed to both minimize the importance of the river to the city’s landscape and history and capitalize on its limited resources; water companies tried to manipulate natural resources, adding reservoirs and building in an infiltration gallery in order to accommodate for the water needs of the rapidly growing population. The reading stated that this human interference with the natural flow of the river actually ended up running the river dry by the late 1800s, way before the U.S. Army Control of Engineers began constructing the concrete river we know today, which took place between 1935 and 1959. The chapter explains that developments like the ones described above were at the center of Los Angeles public and political debate...

My littlest brother was born a few weeks ago, days before Governor Newsom announced the "Safer at Home" order for California. My stepdad and I were planning on both going to the hospital with my mom to welcome my baby brother into the world. When the time came to go to the hospital, we piled into the car, leaving my other little brother at home with my grandma, and drove off to Huntington Hospital. Arriving there was eerie. A few days before, we had learned of the first case of COVID-19 in Pasadena and subsequently found out that there were some COVID patients being treated at Huntington. That being said, there was a lot of nervousness surrounding going to a hospital, but you can't put the birth of a child on hold. We walked over to the maternity ward to check in, only to be told that two hours earlier the hospital had changed its visitor policy. Only one visitor was allowed for each patient. My family was upset, but we understood the rationale and importance of the new r...

Questioning Unity As the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic continues to dramatically alter the way people around the world lead their daily lives, the true characters of communities, whether it be large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles or small rural areas, are beginning to surface in ways in which they may never have. In a matter of what felt like only a week or two, Los Angeles went from its ground state of noise, action, outings, traffic, and smog to a truly never-before-seen state of clear skies, crisp air, empty freeways, and overall eerie tranquility. This radical transformation was of course achieved by the city taking action against the spread of COVID-19, arguably the most important measures being California Governor Gavin Newsom’s statewide state of emergency announcement on March 4th and the implementation of the “Safer at Home” initiative for LA County as a whole on March 19th.  What I’m wondering is what, if anything, has come to light as a result of C...