The City of Angels has gone to the rats.
Why should we care? you might ask. Los Angeles is a world away from our tidy little existence. Its problems are not ours.
True. But its problem is an opportunity for us here in Texarkana, an occasion for us to shed a label that was unfairly given and certainly no longer applies: Rat Capital of the U.S.
It was 50 years ago that TIME magazine-an immensely important news provider at the time-told its national audience of our plight. It was 1969, and we had 900,000 rats-30 times the national average. As you might expect, a slew of other unsavory news reports followed, both broadcast and print. We suddenly had a reputation.
Now, how they determined we had close to a million of these rodents is certainly a fair question. You'd think it would be hard to get a head count on critters that are more often out of sight than out of mind. But somehow a census was taken and we came out on top.
And while much of the nation has forgotten about that short-lived distinction, people here haven't. As a community we don't have much of a sense of humor about this. But we should. It is not who we are now. It was not that unusual back then.
Many other small cities at the time were struggling without sanitation and trash pick-up. The expectation for city services had not been established at that time. This was a problem that plagued many parts of our county at many points in its history. Texarkana didn't deserve to be singled out. We weren't that unique.
But in 1969, the nation had turned hip, and what was happening in Texarkana was not hip in any way.
But those times aren't these times. If anything, today's expectations for clean living are even higher, particularly in a place like Los Angeles, one of the crown jewels of the California coast and trendy lifestyles.
You wouldn't expect what was reported about Texarkana in 1969 to be true about any place of importance in America in 2019.
But find a search engine and type in Los Angeles and rats and see what comes up. That city is in trouble.
Here are a couple of descriptions culled from an opinion piece by Tammy Bruce of The Washington Times for Fox News:
"Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported (in May) on the obscene condition of downtown Los Angeles, 'A mountain of rotting, oozing, stinking trash stretching a good 20 yards along a skid row alley. Rats popped their heads out of the debris like they were in a game of Whac-A-Mole, then scampered for cover as a tractor with a scoop lurched toward them.
'The trash problem is not confined to any one street, but this particular location on the 800 block of Ceres Avenue is surrounded by food distribution companies that sell to shoppers, vendors, stores and restaurants. I counted seven within a block, so you have to wonder-given the colonies of football-size rats-about the potential contamination of the food supply chain and the spread of disease.'"
(The Bruce piece was a condemnation of liberal policy and governance in California, but that's off point for this purpose. This is strictly about the rats.)
Later in the diatribe, she wrote:
"Speaking of medieval crises, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the addiction medicine specialist, told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that a deadly epidemic could emerge in Los Angeles during the summer months.
'I live in the great state of California, the utopia that is California, which is a nightmare,' Pinsky said. 'I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.' He continued, 'We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We're the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We're gonna have louse-borne illness '"
Rats have taken over the city. No rodent control program. These sound like headlines from somewhere else's past.
The reports out of Texarkana in 1969 never sounded that grim. The notoriety the infestation brought our small city acted as a wake-up call and Texarkana quickly cleaned up its act. But will the stigma ever be expunged from our collective recall?
The episode seems to be always lingering in the background, awaiting a reason to emerge again.
Will Texarkana folks ever be able to look at what happened in 1969 with any perspective? Probably not.
Earlier this year, when some street lights were disabled by rats eating the wiring along Interstate 30 in Texarkana, it was a cue to dredge up the whole ugly affair. Even an opinion writer at the state newspaper in Little Rock had a field day, doing the equivalent of a help-wanted ad on its Editorial Page, alluding to our immediate need for a Pied-Piper-like person to lead the rats out of town and into the Red River to drown.
A lot of chuckling followed, and a lot of deep sighs.
But what is happening in L.A. right now is going to change all that.
For those who have been haunted by the stigma placed on Texarkana 50 years ago, it is time to be rid of that yoke. Close those history books and stop reliving the dark past.
A new day has dawned on the West Coast and we should be grateful.
We gladly pass this unwanted distinction to L.A. with no malice or ill will. Maybe by 2069 your citizenry will be able to look back and laugh about it, too.
Then again, maybe not.