Daily News, Sunday, September 11, 1994

I'm sitting on a granite rock under a big Ponderosa pine eating a bag of salted peanuts, drinking a can of orange soda and contemplating the decline of civilization in America.

I'd come to 6,000-foot-high Crystal Lake in the San Gabriel Mountains above Azusa to spend the day in the clean air and magnificent pines - except the ranger tells us to leave by 4 p.m. They don't have the manpower to either clean the campground or supervise the campers. The campsites are littered with fallen branches and the cabins defaced with names of gangs. When we pull into a parking lot behind a low-riding pickup truck, out jumps a man with four 12-packs of beer and a bag of ice to join his friends under the pines.

Heading back down the mountain we pass about 5,000 cars, lining both sides of the roads, while men sit on rocks beside the creek, listening to the ta-thubba-thubba-thub of their over-amped car stereos and sucking down beers. At the bottom of the hill we go through a sobriety checkpoint where sheriff's deputies smile benignly on my 9-year-old son and our two mountain bikes and give me a ball point pen as a reward for being sober.

It was just another Sunday afternoon in the country. We used to call it The Great American Experiment. Well, I'm here to tell you it's one experiment that's not working out. The barbarians are winning. The good people are demoralized. And our community more and more has the feel of an occupied city.

A week ago I drove by the Yosemite Recreation Center in Eagle Rock. Off behind the swim center, nestled in the hillside, is a little stone amphitheater, dating from a time when people were more sophisticated, more neighborly and less apt to murder their neighbors. It has seats for perhaps 700 people, tall light poles, a nice green lawn for a stage. I can readily imagine local residents back in the 1930s and '40s, gathering early on a summer evening to listen to Shakespeare, big bands, folk music, string quartets or the local high school band, and then later, feeling mellow and at peace with the world, would walk home arm and arm in the night air.

Anyone who would try that now would be nuts. It isn't just that they don't give concerts there anymore (someone has torn all the wooden seats off the stone benches), but the place has become a hangout for gangs, which leave paper bags full of bottles and beer cans on the stone seats. They decorate every vertical surface, including light poles, trees and electrical conduits, with their names. If tagging is the urban equivalent to planting the flag, taking over the territory and proclaiming your opponents vanquished, then the war is over and the gangs have won. They've taken over the streets from working people and family men.

You don't have to go around looking for examples of societal collapse. They hit you in the face every time you turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper. At some public swimming pools the gangs have taken over so much that the lifeguards don't blow their whistles or yell at kids running around the pool decks. They don't dare. Gang members tend to congregate outside some swimming pools, drinking beer, shooting craps and watching the pool with cold, menacing eyes. If a lifeguard were to speak too harshly to some unruly kid, his older brother (and the rest of the gang, too) might come swarming over the fence.

That's what happened in July at the Will Rogers pool in Watts when a lifeguard tried to restrain an unruly kid. Some 30 gang members jumped the fence and beat up the lifeguards, leaving one with a broken nose and another with several cracked teeth. The following day at the same pool, another lifeguard tried to protect a 13-year-old kid who was being hazed by older kids. The lifeguard was so badly kicked and beaten that he slipped into a coma.

But the most depressing part isn't the violence or injuries - it's what the pool managers have to do to survive. Talking down to any of the kids is like lighting a fuse to a bomb, said one manager. "Sometimes we have to give respect in order to get it."

Excuse me, but what have gang members done in order to deserve respect? Spray-paint the walls? Deal drugs? Kill toddlers and schoolgirls in drive-by shootings? Beat up lifeguards so badly that they end up in a coma?

If I were a pool manager, I'd feel pretty humiliated if I could only do my job by "giving respect" to a bunch of vicious, semiliterate, adolescent hoods in baggy pants. No grown man should have to put up with that in order to earn a living. It's a terrible predicament. Working men don't travel in gangs and don't carry weapons. A single adult male wouldn't have a chance against a gang.

You can't just say, why doesn't he call the cops? The cops are busy dealing with stabbings, shootings and robberies in progress. They don't have time to try to stop a bunch of boys harassing the pool manager. Besides, how long does it take a gang to jump over a fence and kick a lifeguard into a coma? Fifty seconds? One minute? No matter how fast the cops respond to the call, they'd never get there in time to stop the beating anyway. So the boys, who are organized into gangs, humiliate adult working men who are not.

This is not the order of things. In any stable, decent society, men are not afraid of boys. When there's a problem, the men organize, confront the trouble-makers, who are never any match for determined adult men, and the problem is solved - on the spot. This is how it works all over the world. This is how it's always worked in every age. The only place this doesn't work is when the society in question is already in the later stages of internal collapse - in other words, in cities like Los Angeles.