Opinion: Angelenos are rude and depressed and our road rage is totally unwarranted

Like New Yorkers we are mostly transplants, but there’s a difference. People tend to move to the Big Apple expressly to make themselves part of a famous, ongoing civic enterprise. By contrast, I think what our late Mayor Tom Bradley once said is still true: People who come to L.A. ‘are looking for a place where they can be free’ -- from tradition, the past, even from community. More than NYC, L.A. is a city of disconnected exiles. But it doesn’t make us rude. I think we strive for just enough everyday courtesy to keep strangers and the unfamiliar at bay without getting ourselves into too much conflict.A few decades ago, essayist Edmund White found this act of keeping the world at arms’ length almost the opposite of rudeness. ‘The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast,’ he wrote, ‘is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast.... So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield) that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.’