Below the penthouse party, rubble, burned lots, and boarded storefronts stretch across neighborhoods where the cost of those cocktail-party convictions actually landed.
My father struggled with alcoholism. He put me and my brother through real trauma. As Asian Americans we just went into society assuming we were fine, and it came out in strange ways I didn’t have language for.
Then I sat down with Rob Henderson.
Henderson grew up in Los Angeles. Ten foster homes. Each of his three names, he told me, “were taken from adults that I no longer speak with and have essentially either neglected or abandoned me during my childhood.” Air Force at 17. Yale on the GI Bill. PhD from Cambridge. Along the way he spotted a pattern that explains why California keeps getting worse for the people politicians claim to help. He calls them luxury beliefs: ideas that cost nothing to hold if you’re rich and everything if you’re poor.
California is the world capital of luxury beliefs. And the body count is rising.