Slab City: A Political Rorschach Test
I went for a drive through the desert, and a cult monument called Salvation Mountain was on my route. I went by and crashed a wedding photoshoot. Weird spot, but what’s past it is even weirder. Annoyingly, I finished my roll of film right before arriving, but I didn’t spend too much time there anyway.
Past Salvation Mountain is a squatter community called Slab City. It’s named after some concrete slabs left by the army, when it was a weapons testing site. They’re colorfully painted, and advertise “Slab City: The Last Free Place in the World”. Driving down a bone-rattling dirt road, you pass by people hocking scraps and art.
Living in Baltimore, I spent some time passing through sketchy neighborhoods but I never had such a weird gut feeling as I did here.
Slab city is a wasteland. The homes are RV’s spray painted “Occupied” so another junkie doesn’t come in and set up shop. Toothless and sun-scorched people are walking around staring at you like meat as you drive by on your shiny motorcycle. I wanted to visit the “library” and “hostel” (link to the hostel below), but genuinely was afraid of getting robbed. There are no police there, it is not hooked up to the power grid, there is no running water. Some notorious cases of murderers hiding out there, and murders taking place there make it an unattractive option for a vacation.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/21407674?source_impression_id=p3_1609612042_zJxc15iExEa%2FRCr4&guests=1&adults=1
My internal response was to see this place and think “holy fuck these people need help.” This community needs organization. It needs resources, these people need support and an opportunity to improve their lives. I found it unacceptable that people could be so dejected from society as to live in squalor.
I texted a friend who is more politically libertarian than me ; and his first response was different. He observed that most of these people are on social security and collecting government checks, and without them these people wouldn’t be sustain the system. The meager government support locks in this system. That’s true I guess.
These people either need way more or way less help. I call it a political Rorschach test because how you respond to the same thing reveals something about how you think. I think that these kinds of Rorschach tests are all over the place.