The awakening: As the corona virus pandemic tightens its grip on California’s largest cities, some residents are fleeing urban sprawl and seeking shelter in isolated communities in the Mojave Desert or rugged Sierra Nevada. Their hope, they say, is to avoid possible public unrest and limit their exposure to the virus.
These new urban immigrants are not entirely welcome, however. Locals fear their arrival could overwhelm the public health systems of small towns already struggling to cope with the growing crisis, and public health officials worry the movement will lead to greater spread of the highly contagious virus.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday night that residents were forbidden from moving to or from vacation homes outside the city, along with a number of other health and safety restrictions aimed at fighting contagion.
In Mammoth Lakes, a small Eastern Sierra town that survives primarily on skiing at Mammoth Mountain, the tourism board last week told nonresidents to keep out. “I’ve seen this kind of fear and desperation before in Israel during rocket attacks,” one member said. “A friend recently asked if I had a gun he could borrow. I said absolutely not.”
While all of this is pretty much what many of us have expect to be the natural progression of fear turned to panic as those folk who failed to prepare are now faced with the realization that time has run out. We will probably recover from this shortly, but what if we don’t or for that matter what of next year (or next time with a new disease).
For us that have been keeping one eye on the risk meter for years and have planned accordingly, an ‘I told you so’ brings no satisfaction. There are millions upon millions of folk that live in LA scrambling for some semblance of safety only to find one real truth of life: The only safety is that which you secure for yourself.
There is an old saying: ‘failure to prepare on YOUR part does not constitute an emergency on MY part’.
And NO – I wouldn’t ‘loan’ a gun (presuming I had any) to any one.