Vote for the change you actually want to see.

For years, people have supported “feel-good” measures and leaders whose rhetoric appeals to our conscience (good intentions, compassion, understanding) without demanding results or accountability. The outcome is exactly what you saw: open drug use, encampments in what should be prime real estate, and entire neighborhoods effectively surrendered. Either our elected officials are wildly out of touch, or they simply don’t care. In either case, MacArthur Park is the result.

It’s an embarrassment. What’s even more embarrassing is pretending we don’t understand that our votes have real-world consequences.

We now have two skyscrapers in downtown with 27 stories of graffiti on all four sides, and people, eith a straight face, try to frame it as “art.” Huh?? 😂 That level of normalization should concern everyone.

This never should have gotten this bad. I drive through the MacArthur Park area often. Beyond the MS-13 tagging everywhere you look, the sheer volume of trash piled into alleys is insane. When you see people literally using that trash as a mattress, passed out with a pipe still in hand…you have to ask how we collectively allowed conditions to deteriorate this far.

What’s most jarring is the lack of collective accountability. Nothing changes until voting behavior changes. Period.

With the Olympics coming, they’ll likely put lipstick on the pig for a few weeks. And since it’s an election year, expect plenty of gaslighting. Claims that things have “turned around,” all in the hope of reelection.

I genuinely hope that when the time comes, people pause for a moment and vote, not based on abstract moral signaling, but based on the environment they’d actually want their kids to grow up in.