Perspective in Los Angeles is a very unique thing. Nowhere else can you find people who collectively believe that anything east of Los Angeles is simply some land between Los Angeles and New York City. I have lost track of the number of times people have believed Ohio, Iowa, and Idaho are right next to each other!
Los Angeles is a city that not only isolates people from people, but isolates Los Angeles from the world. This is slightly ironic because the world is very aware of what happens in Los Angeles. Los Angeles sets trends that change the world.
Los Angeles makes you feel like the other half of the city is a world apart. However, from any location in LA, you can have a view of the entire city. Driving from LAX along the 105, one can see the whole Los Angeles valley including Downtown, the Hollywood Sign, and the ocean. From certain perspectives, they all seem so close together.
The perspective of our lives will determine what we do and what we avoid doing. All too often, our perspective is our world. And all too often we are slow to see this change.
Recently I was reading how the metropolis of Los Angeles was created. In The Reluctant Metropolis, the author explains how LA was made. In the midst of gorgeous weather, people flocked to the area in order to avoid the busy metropolis of other cities. They established their own autonomous communities that were loosely connected with each other. They desired to travel to the bigger downtown areas for its commodities but not live there. They pushed back against the big city life while the cities of Southern California began to merge with each other because of booming growth. Eventually, they created the very thing they were avoiding. The author uses this sense of autonomy to explain how the LA riots and racial tensions in 1992 only affected neighboring cities. Although I may have only lived 5 miles away from the riots, the perspective was if I don’t live there, it doesn’t concern me. It is all a matter of perspective.
If you live in Los Angeles, you know how much this makes sense of everything! The needs of the community in South Central LA are not a concern for those who live in the Valley. The cultural differences between geographic locations of the city of Los Angeles seem vast. Not to mention, working together for the good of Los Angeles is a complex topic and an uphill battle. The birth of Los Angeles explains the relational isolation of the city and its isolation with the world.
If you don’t live in Los Angeles, this is the lay of the land. So how does a region work together for our shared cultural issues? Anybody…?
There are no easy answers for the challenges that face our city. The perspective of our own lives and of this city have determined how we respond to it.
So it may be that we are fighting to have a new perspective of our own lives and of our neighborhoods. We are fighting to not succumb to the tendency to isolate. We are jumping feet first into the potential and resource of Los Angeles. We hope to use it for our gain but too often find ourselves used by it. Instead of fighting for a greater perspective, we find ourselves fighting for our lives.
Like all of us, in order to fight our perspective, we must have the option of choosing a perspective that is greater than our own. We must be connected to a greater perspective. It is a simple as that.
So for the city of Los Angeles I believe this perspective is a city redeemed by the vast implications of the good news of God’s grace. It is the hope that God is not done restoring what has been damaged and that He can use us to bring transforming power to our neighborhoods. It is a perspective that God is not done making this city whole.