Lost Angeles

God Blessed the City of Angels - We Must Redeem Her

On a dusty, blood-speckled road outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, a condemned man turned to the women weeping in his wake and delivered a a chilling admonition. “Daughters of Jerusalem,” he said as he staggered beneath the weight of the cross, “do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’”. Among all the words of Jesus Christ, particularly in his final days of salvation, these, from Luke 23 are often overlooked, and perhaps the most prescient. They were spoken en route to Golgotha, hours before the ultimate sacrifice.

It was a shocking reversal of Jewish values, which have always held that children are a supreme blessing from God. But Jesus was not cursing motherhood. He was warning of a future so saturated with horror, siege, famine, the collapse of a society that had turned its back on covenant and compassion…that bringing children into it would feel like an act of cruelty. Better to forego God’s most supreme blessing, entirely, than to watch your sons and daughters suffer through the evil times ahead.

It is a verse that lands differently 2,000 years later, in Los Angeles, the city that still dares to call itself the City of Angels. Here, amid the fading palm-lined paradise, a quiet, secular echo of that ancient lament has taken root. Fertility rates in California have plunged to historic lows; just 10 births per 1,000 residents, with the state’s total fertility rate hovering around 1.48 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Los Angeles County has often outpaced the decline; births have fallen steadily for decades. Demographers point to the usual suspects: stratospheric housing costs, the gig-economy grind, delayed childbearing into the late thirties and forties. But beneath the spreadsheets lies a deeper, more visceral reluctance. Many women look at the world their children would inherit and simply say “no”. Not because they lack love or ambition or the biological pull to mother a child, but because the future feels too broken to inflict on another generation; they’ve lost hope in our city.

Walk the streets of downtown Los Angeles any morning and you will see why. On Skid Row, a 55-block Gomorrah of human wreckage. Karen Basura and Nithya Raman gleefully distribute drug paraphernalia in the name of “harm reduction”, which simply streamlines the turning of once-living bodies into zombies, slumped in doorways with open sores, limbs rotting from untreated infections. Open-air drug markets operate in broad daylight. Just this week, next to a popular bike path in Nithya Raman’s district, where families and bikers need to dodge the hepatitis-laced drug needles that Raman handed out to the zombies, another poor soul died in the tent. Raman had disregarded her community’s demands that she address the encampment; she shrugged it off saying that the gentle concrete slopes of the LA River made it “hard to reach”.

Another man died in full public view, at a bus stop, beneath a movie poster that read “they will kill you”, an unbelievably macabre irony; a detestable commentary on how lost we really are. To make it worse…Angelenos on social media were more upset with the fact that there were pictures of the man posted online, than they were with the fact that he was left to die in public. So it’s fine if it happens in full view of children and families on the street? Just don’t dare post about it?

It’s hard to not look around at Lost Angeles and think…this is precisely the grim prophecy that our ancestors spoke of. Even for those who don’t read scripture, do you remember Idiocracy? The overly-therapized yuppie couple wants to hold off on having kids, “not with the market the way that it is”. They struggle with infertility because they waited too long, the husband dies, and the aging wife freezes her eggs in a desperate hope she’ll find the right man, and the right time, to finally have the children she truly wanted.

It was an eery prediction of what we’re experiencing today. Young women are proactively freezing their eggs like some kind of investment portfolio. Many imagine pushing a stroller past the zombie nodding out on the park playground, or explaining to a kindergartner why that woman is screaming at invisible demons in the sewer, and they think, “why bring a child into a city that can’t keep its own adults alive?” There are many factors…career ambition, student debt, and the two-income trap that still leaves families priced out of decent housing all play roles. News-induced “climate anxiety” and political polarization compound the problem. Yet the visible collapse of public order…the tent villages of Zombieland, the sense that the social contract has frayed beyond repair, functions as a daily sermon on futility.

The parallel to Jesus’ original warning is perhaps uncomfortable but necessary. The Roman siege of 70 A.D. ushered in starvation that drove mothers to cannibalism and children died in the streets. The barren were, in a macabre sense, spared the worst grief. In 21st century Los Angeles, the horror is slower, more diffuse; more like a spiritual and civic entropy. It is the slow erosion of the belief that our best days aren’t yet behind us. When women who once dreamed of nurseries now whisper, “I don’t want to watch my kid grow up in this,” they are echoing the ancient lament whether or not they know their scripture. The difference, of course, is agency. First-century women had no choice, but 21st century American women are choosing this cynical path. The tragedy is that biology and culture are colliding head-on: the same species wired for nurture is choosing self-preservation because their city simply feels irredeemable.

But Jesus’ sacrifice was never about resignation. He accepted his fate, but the cross was the ultimate refusal to let evil have the last word over man. His death and resurrection were an invitation to renewal…to resurrect what sin and apathy had mutilated and destroyed. The same imperative applies to our City of Angels, today. We cannot afford to give up on it. This demographic winter is not inevitable; it is a symptom of neglect and hopelessness.

Los Angeles endures as a global magnet for talent, creativity, and capital precisely because its promise of reinvention, of beauty, of sequels (yes, some sequels are better than the original, thank you James Cameron). That hope still exists beneath the filth and grime…we can all sense that it does, otherwise we’d have all left. But that promise only endures if families can once again envision raising children amid palm trees rather than fent tents. Revival demands more than another bond measure or Instagram-friendly “care campus.” It requires sustained, unglamorous work: clearing encampments decisively, mandating treatment for addiction, enforcing basic public order so sidewalks belong to pedestrians again, and reimagining neighborhoods as places where strollers are more common than corpses.

Jesus did not tell the daughters of Jerusalem to stop weeping; he told them to redirect their tears toward the future they could still shape. The same holds for Lost Angeles. To choose childlessness out of despair is understandable, but it is unacceptable. The cross stands as a reminder: even in the darkest hour, on the loneliest road, redemption is at hand. It is built, block by block, one cleared sidewalk, one renewed neighborhood at a time. We will inspire a renaissance for the history books in Los Angeles. We will not give up on our mothers. We will not abandon our children. We will do the hard things. We will raise the spirit of this city, and make the City of Angels everything its name implies, so help me God.