Array
If one is unfamiliar with California, the really old California city of Santa Ana is about 45 miles or so due south of the heart of Los Angeles (If you take the 5 north and then the 110 into Los Angeles, according to Google miles.).
We lived there for about 12 years in the early 80s to the 90s. It was the, um, colorful alternative to buying a house out in Riverside, like many of our fellow Marines did. It was nice because you owned something eventually. But most of them also had to put a kid in a car seat at four in the morning — with a juice box in one hand and a donut in the other — to try to beat the traffic back to either El Toro or Tustin to get to base by 0700.
Sometimes, nobody got back to their homes until 7 at night, thanks again to the hordes of cars on their way east at rush hour. Only no one was rushing anywhere in that vast parking lot of a freeway system.
Miss your window by five minutes and it could cost your commute an additional hour.
We didn’t think that left much time for family anything, and with Ebola growing up with two active duty Marines for parents constantly coming and going, we wanted the time we had together spent being together, not sitting in a car on the 55 creeping along.
So we found a townhouse to rent and just sort of stayed there forever. The trade-off to being closer to both our bases was having to pay for Ebola’s private schools once he grew out of the daycare stage.
We had what looked like the cutest little elementary school right across the street, but we lived in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. The school had only enough textbooks to distribute one for every three children. English was essentially a second language. Lessons had to be taught first in English, then retaught in Spanish during a single class period every time.
No one was learning anything.
Luckily, there was a terrific Catholic school down a few blocks over.
I won’t say it wasn’t exciting once in a while. Thanks to living on Fifth Street, I know what automatic gunfire sounds like. And the thunk of rounds hitting the roof as they dropped on New Year’s Eve or some celebration.
Local flavor.
But even during the Rodney King riots, it was ‘safe.’ Everyone stayed in their lane.
The outskirts of Los Angeles could have been only a 40-minute drive away on a good traffic day, but it might as well have been light years. Santa Ana was so different. Mexican, yeah. But it had its charm.
So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw the headline on an Orange County Register email today (Yeah, still get them after all these years) about Santa Ana.
Holy frickin’ smokes.
National Guard in downtown Santa Ana after protesters clashed with police over ICE raids
That couldn’t be MY Santa Ana?!
National Guard units blocked off roadways in portions of the county Civic Center on Tuesday morning, a day after tensions over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations across Southern California spread to Orange County, resulting in clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Downtown Santa Ana.
