For the second year in a row, the number of murders in the City of Los Angeles dropped below 300.  When last that happened, it was 1967 and the population was 30% smaller than it is today.  Former LAPD Chief of Police Bill Bratton quickly praised the police force.

“It’s human beings who decide intentionally to commit a crime, criminals, or many others who get caught up in the moment of passion under the inducement of alcohol or drugs and commit crimes. That’s what police exist for, to control behavior.” – Bratton on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

However, rather than intervention by police upon errant Angelenos, I offer another idea: that the spread of technology has a major role in the falling numbers of violent acts, namely the ubiquitous mobile phone, working as both an adequate deterrent and an effective means of containment.

Allow, if you will, one writer a chance to elaborate.

To say that Occupy Los Angeles rang false and failed to capture the spirit of the 1960s would be both trite and obvious.  In the end, the effort appeared more to be a symptom of the times than a true and definable cause.  The movement became easy to ignore, especially considering the vast sprawl of Los Angeles and the current state of economic affairs for those who are employed.  Who has time to stop and support an effort in the midst of such a troubling economic shakedown?

American writers like Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson both captured and uplifted the bohemian ideal, a principle receding from the subset of American cultural values, supplanted instead by the spreading tentacles of technology.  Why else would Occupy LA come and go as such a flash in the proverbial pan?  Those bohemian standards simply do not resonate with any depth in our increasingly modern society.

This city’s wholesale dismissal of the months-long Occupy LA movement and its timid cluster of campers around City Hall, compared to the attention given the recent spate of vehicle arsons (a series of rare, violent exceptions to relatively tranquil parts of the city) is telling of both media outlets and citizens alike.

We long ago became numb to the plodding humanistic plight of the Occupy crowd, despite its relative popularity, fringe-movement-wise, versus the even shorter-lived flash-in-the-proverbial-pan Tea Party endeavor.

That convoluted experiences have more US citizens embracing elements of beliefs into their cultural-philosophical lenses, rather than wholesale indoctrination by “noble causes,” appears to be the real story here.  That we’re not necessarily disaffected or cynical, just ever more complicated, multi-faceted. Americans identify themselves in greater and greater numbers as politically independent.  A December 21^st, 2011 Gallup poll reported that a majority of participants responded with a no, when asked “Is there any candidate who would make a good president.”  (Which is not to mention universally dismal Congressional job approval figures.)

We are entering again the choppy American political season.  To follow national politics closely is to have your heart repeatedly battered and bruised, no matter with which party you most closely identify.  Unlike the Occupiers or Tea Party-types, I am careful not to dismiss outright my many Libertarian friends.  They are generally young, technologically savvy, and, on the balance, intelligent.

Their’s is a political platform with genuine potential that speaks to the possibility of governance with far less federal regulation that the US currently exhibits.  Considering our post-industrial existence -this information age- aspects of Libtertarianism seem to speak directly to our more progressive behavior, though I am very careful not to embrace any nascent political ideology prematurely.

One fixation that both Democrats and Republicans enjoy, provided they can remain civil, is an ongoing dialogue of parry and thrust, both within their political circles and between their political circles.  This is true both publically and privately.  The Libertarians I often encounter have an odd way of sounding that like that crazy guy who repetitively mumbles to himself while waiting for a bus that has not, nor may ever, arrive.  Flat tax!  Smaller government!  End the Fed! It’s a well-organized rant, not a two-way discussion.

If Libertarianism seeks to rise beyond the sadly symptomatic Occupy and Tea Party spells, it must find a means to position its ideas into the national conversation. 

Many young Americans claim to be independent but default to the Democratic Party for what, to them, are fairly comprehensible reasons.  After being lambasted as spoilers in 2000’s Gore-Bush fiasco, numerous younger voters see any effort away from the Democratic Party as by-proxy assistance to the GOP.

The younger generation takes it as a given that to grow up in an age of increasing global awareness -in which the entire world is accessible, visible, and on superficial terms, outright knowable- was an unavoidable aspect of our 80s and 90s media diet.  Place this perspective against that of many older conservatives with more mono-cultural life experiences, and many young people can’t help but be embarrassed, in some cases mortified, by a GOP who seems to represent everything about the US that is abhorred abroad and to the culturally phobic, far too comfortable.

This is not a call for a Libertarian uprising. This is a plea to examine elements of a distinct philosophy that might better serve a technologically enmeshed society.  To be abundantly clear, I am not talking about Ron Paul, who’s past ideologies and associations remain suspect and whose son is one of those Embarrassing Americans.  Nor am I talking about Gary Johnson, who frankly, nobody’s really heard of.

I am speaking directly to those who knew the words of Marshal McLuhan and his predictions about “the electric age” and the evisceration of private identity.  To coin a phrase I recently overheard, “That was now.  This is then.”

In an era defined by vanishing privacy and increasing information transparency, the two-party system stumbles on, a petrified relic of political duality.  Every American would be better served by a more nuanced selection of presidential candidates, perhaps not in this election, but certainly in those to come.

opinion by Zach Urbina