The Coast Starlight travels from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington, with a throughway connection from San Diego, and continuing from Seattle to a throughway connection for Vancouver, BC, Canada, for the second bookends.
In my time, L. A. news was dominated by the three Bs-Beverly Hills of the palatial homes of the movie moguls, bewitched Bel Air of the movie stars, and O. J. Simpson's Brentwood neighborhood on West Hollywood.
My familiarity to this geography began in 1966 when as a young student, I waiter'd for a Polynesian-motif'd restaurant called The Luau on Rodeo Drive, head office of the Port o'Call and Kon-Tiki restaurant chain of Sheraton Hotels, while commuting from S. Figueroa on 137th St. in Watts, a year after the riots. It was a two-hour commute each way through central L.A.
Rodeo Drive was a sleepy tree-shaded street before it became an extension of exclusive DFS boutiques. By the city on Santa Monica are the famed beaches of Venice, Manhattan, and Redondo where the disgrace of the 99 lb. weakling originated, and the masculine image of the body builder flourished, when Rock Hudson's masculinity was still unassailably pristine. Malibu Beach is further north though that geographical designation no longer refers to direction but to the fabulous world of fantasy that this part of California has spawned.
The famous Santa Monica Blvd. is where many homes on its borders sport a placard that reads: “I believe in I DO, the right to marry.” Proposition 8 derailed that rail in CA's social policies, but Sunset Boulevard has since become L.A.'s Bay Area Castro district where nobody minds when guys exchange heartfelt lingering abrazos, and the girls do not hesitate to hold hands while wriggling breast-to-breast and hip-to-hip. It continues to be where the aspiring movie star makes a point to be widely seen, and Rodeo Drive is where the rest of the world now wants to be spotted shopping. The image is the message; what you see is not necessarily what is real.
What is real is my High School class valedictorian from the INHS60 in Laoag City. From Marcos' Ilocos Norte, he waded through UP's program for PhyScience cum laude, hitched a Fulbright scholarship at U Hawaii's East-West Center, moved to California as a social weather statistician, and decided to go after his original passion-medicine. Degree'd in Grenada, licensed in California, he honed his Spanish and serves the low income Latinos as El Doctor Bueno with the doggedness of a Gandhi and the compassion of a Mother Teresa, from a storefront in Wilmington, a mile from the Port of Los Angeles.
In the current emotionally strung debate on Obama healthcare where the standard practice is a national shouting match across aisles and picket lines, town halls and legislatures, El Doctor Bueno is an anomaly. He treats people out of a clinic wedged between a nail care center and a jewelry shop, on a cash-only basis, charging a consultation fee that is barely a third of what is charged by private and public medical centers.
Frugal in his personal spending, the Doctor earns his money by running a clinic that is homey to his low-income clients, eschews filling forms of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, charges low and runs his own pharmacy that dispenses medicine at half the cost of the Rite Aid four doors away. His regimen of remedies is biased against dependence on antibiotics and too much pharmacological interventions, in lieu of homegrown remedies of herbs and other organic resource. He is himself his own manager, administrator, clerk, receptionist, pharmacist and janitor. A local nurse's aide helps keep the clinic running, which gives him a rebate from the city for employing a town resident.
His general practitioner bedside manner earns him a loyal following, and his loyalty to them is shown by the fact that if a patient returns with the same ailment, they do not get charged with a consultation fee again. The cost of health care has become prohibitive for many reasons, one being the padding on billings for unnecessary lab tests and services to defray the high cost of malpractice insurance and other litigations.
El Doctor Bueno views the current legislative policy deliberations with benign equanimity-a this-too-will-pass stance, and now at a retireable age, he continues to serve his chosen clientele in the tradition of selflessness and compassion before healthcare became a franchised profitable commercial venture-still with due diligence, efficiency and effectivity!
Though eminently qualified to show how ridiculous the current dichotomy between public option and private enterprise is in providing adequate health services, neither an either/or but a both/and proposition, his notable practice will not be featured in the current debate. As an immigrant, a good number of otherwise sensible Americans will look down on him, even as muckraking partisans have called Obama a liar even in the halls of Congress, and ultraconservative groupies in town hall meetings continue to dub the proponents of health care reform as a socialists, communists, masked Muslims and, heaven help us, Washington insiders beholden to leftist lobbyists!
To his credit, Obama is acting more presidential now rather than appearing to be a smooth talking pro with political savvy. A diehard Republican old lady who sat with me on the Coast Starlight from L.A. to Los Robles (pronounced Rubles by the locals) on my way to San Francisco, decided that less government is best, but that at critical moments, it is well to expect the federal government to take the lead in supporting majority rule and protecting minority rights. She didn't think it was the business of government to dictate to a girl what she should do with her body after a coerced or forced pregnancy. Nor should she be denied the right to choose. For once, a level-headed and fair-hearted Republican!
The War on Terror is also the War of Horror in America, and whether the task is silencing the guns of the Afghans, or promoting the cause of world peace began at Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco more than 60 years ago, or vying for influence on the soul of America, the tactic has come to painting the most terrifying and horrifying scenario to grab people's attention and support. There are no clear winners in these struggles. There are only survivors. And the survivors will be spiritually handicapped the rest of their lives.
We journey to journey on, and America by rails is rich fodder for reflections, indeed.
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