Why This Blog? Why Angels Moving Forward?

Sitting here in my Southern California apartment in the middle of a pandemic, with economic depression levels of unemployment, with a federal "secret police" disappearing" peaceful protesters into unmarked vehicles in Portland, Oregon (and soon to be rolled out to cities nationwide), I am pondering where we go from here, assuming we survive the tumultuous next six months.

I have blogged on public transit issues in my community before.  My passion is urban policy, particularly transportation policy.  However, the crushing pandemic has brutally illustrated that everything is connected:  transportation, land use, economic development, the environment and ecology, public health, social justice, race relations, civil rights, communications, technology.  It's all related. 

Also, in this pandemic I have witnessed countries like Japan, New Zealand, Germany, and South Korea that approached this pandemic with a sense of civic duty and social solidarity. and had much lower death rates from COVID-19.  As of writing, America's infection, hospitalization, and death rates from Coronavirus are climbing sky high every day.  

Yes, we have a sociopathic President who doesn't care if the American people live and die in the hundreds of thousands as long as it benefits Wall Street and his superwealthy campaign donors.  Yes, Trump sabotaged Coronavirus testing, and the manufacturing and distribution of personal protective equipment, and people wearing masks.  But the reality is also that tens of millions of people listened to and followed his insanity because they wanted the excuse to be selfish and not give a damn about anyone else. 

I remember from the 80's and 90's it was hard to get non-gays in America to give a damn about the AIDS crisis and too many people thought HIV/AIDS was "killing all the right people".  It wasn't until the death numbers got to be so great and enough people became affected by loss that attitudes began to change.  Likewise, for too many people as long as they can write off "old people", "poor people", or "people of color" they feel they can ignore whether or not they catch and transit COVID-19 -- where their "freedumb" becomes more important than their personal responsibility not to infect anyone else.

Here is the simple truth of a pandemic.  We need all hands on deck to overcome it.  What America is missing right now is "social solidarity" -- a collective concern and sense of service for other people.  Another word for this is "Love".  You may roll your eyes at that word, but that is what the world needs now.  That is what America needs most.   

I live next to the City and in the County of Angels.  To overcome this pandemic, and the create a better city, region, state, country, and world, we need to tap into the better angels of our nature.  We need to infuse the energies of love and compassion into everything we do individually and collectively, and that includes our urban planning and our public policy.

This blog will focus on urban transportation, planning, and health issues, or anything else that speaks to my heart.  Trump will eventually go, the pandemic will eventually be resolved with a vaccine or better treatments, and the economy will eventually come back.  But the selfishness and hate that undermined our response to these  problems will still need to be healed.  That starts with daily acts of love infused in action in our individual personal lives and in our professional and public lives.

Wherever we are, let's be an angel today.