The City Council meeting last week was interrupted by suspected smoke in City Hall. Fortunately, the physical fire was outside of the building. But the meeting was incendiary in every other way.
Overheated rhetoric was directed at the Councilmembers by the public, and far more troubling was the return volley from the Councilmembers, targeted at the public as well as each other. Brutal accusations of racism and antisemitism were made with little regard for the murderous weight of those words as civil discourse was abandoned.
To Mayor Phil Brock’s credit, he alone expressed shame and remorse. "Our job is to help people," he said, "Not to denigrate people on any side."
Afterward, he blamed the election season, without absolving Councilmembers of their responsibility. "We’re not national politicians," he said. "Why are we acting like national politicians?"
Santa Monica is a small city on the far edge of the continent, but even here the bonds of civic engagement have frayed in the current political climate. We’re a week away from a Presidential election that feels more like a slow-motion car crash, with all of us being held captive in the backseat of the car. Many of us feel a sense of powerlessness, and that can easily result in increased combativeness.
However, we’re deceiving ourselves if we believe this militance is only because of the election. I’ve noticed a change in our community going back to the days of COVID quarantines, and the word I’ve used to describe it is "brittle." There’s a fragility and a sharpness to our reactions that I don’t recall before. Too many people are too easily agitated. And too many of us feel entitled to our agitation.
With all the talk about "entitlement," what seems to get overlooked is how many of us feel "entitled" to our own sense of victimhood. And when a billionaire running for the highest office in the land repeatedly describes himself as a victim, who among us wouldn’t also qualify?
But if everyone is a victim, then everyone can also be accused of being a victimizer. This is where the politics of grievance takes us, and this is where we ended up at the Council meeting last week.
Councilmember Oscar de la Torre was on the receiving end of a majority of the criticism, because of a recently publicized allegation of an antisemitic remark in 2019. It’s fair to hold elected officials accountable for their actions, but isolated allegations of poorly considered statements are not the same as crimes against humanity. If his accusers are sincerely concerned about antisemitism and racism in our community then they should have qualms about the boy-who-cried-wolf aspect of their revelations.
It should be noted that Councilmember de la Torre gave as good as he got, tossing about the term "racist" with equally troublesome abandon, but as the meeting stretched to a new day, he seemed chastened. "I hope we survive this election cycle, and we overcome it in a way that makes us a better city," he said, promising to do his part to unite us. "But it’s very difficult when people are punching me, to basically tell me to stop punching back."
There lies the crux of the issue, and not just regarding Councilmember de la Torre. Many people these days believe that if they feel they’ve been wronged, they have the right to lash out, or "punch back," and even an obligation to do so. But this is the danger of viewing ourselves as victims: it diminishes our ability to see when we’re victimizing others. Throw in partisan news coverage, moneyed interests, behind-the scenes power brokers (who were also present at the Council meeting and vocal on both sides), and we end up creating what resembles a Game of Thrones, though fire-breathing dragons couldn’t do more damage to our community than we’re already doing ourselves.
There was actually good news at the Council meeting. There was a unanimous vote in favor of an item by Mayor Brock to replace broken streetlights, and the Council was informed that the vacancy rate on the Third Street Promenade has been reduced from 40% to 16.5%. At another meeting that would have been the headline: Santa Monica is making progress. We’re just too busy flame throwing to notice it.
On November 5th, we get to choose our elected representatives. But every single day we get to choose what kind of society we want to live in. We get to choose what kind of example we want to provide for the next generation. We each have the opportunity to look in the mirror and ask what we’re contributing to the civil fabric of our city and what we can do to improve it.
"We’re all neighbors," Mayor Brock said. "We should act as if we’re all neighbors."
