Posted on 12/19/2010 6:20:36 AM PST by Kaslin
California has been fundamentally transformed. The results stand as a warning to the rest of America.
I am a California native, born and raised here. Im only in my early thirties but can remember a time when my Golden State was a completely different place.
Twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago California was a bountiful land of opportunity that beckoned all — Midwesterners to foreigners – to come here and make a fresh start, to take a shot at the middle class and beyond that the Golden State exclusively offered. California was one of the few places where one would not find judgment waiting for decisions in life or how one ended up here. Multiple-pierced tattoo artist/bartender starting a disco club/tattoo parlor business? No problem. Bearded, beaded, dreadlocked, thick-accented Rastafarian looking to set up shop? Thats just fine too, we welcome you with open arms.
Most cities and neighborhoods were clean, urban, and welcoming, not unlike typical suburban areas and cities across America. The San Diego area (and much of Orange County) had an almost Midwestern feel; values passed from that area of the country to new generations that had emigrated here wove a strong fabric into the population. The Central Valley was the same.
Looking back some 60 years ago, my grandparents came here from the economically downtrodden Texas Dust Bowl in search of the American Dream. Stories of the venture were told at the dinner table, seemingly pulled straight from the pages of a Steinbeck novel. My grandfather started out here performing menial tasks and odd jobs before landing his dream job — a full-time custodial position with benefits. This career was only interrupted once, as he was called for duty in the 40s. Since he was not physically fit to serve overseas, he was enlisted to serve in another way — by performing welding work on U.S. ships being built in Long Beach harbor. Sheets of steel touched and hewn by his own hand helped win the war. He and my grandmother later went on to raise six children and retire in the High Desert.
My grandparents on the other side came here from Missouri to find a better life, They found it in Redlands, California. The family worked an orchard and every “hand” in the family had a part to play. I think back to the vivid stories that my grandfather would tell of the family farm, at least when he felt particularly chatty which was rare and special when it happened. A particular photograph of my grandfather as a small child that he showed me once comes to mind. He was sitting in the back of a Model T, halfway to California from Missoura on the Tin-Lizzy Express, he said. As a young man in his teens he was shipped off to India, enlisted and stationed to the U.S. base there. He never saw combat and came back home to raise four children. The man loved California and rests in peace with military honors at March Air Force Base near Los Angeles.
As I grew up in California, there were indications of what was to come — the creeping issue of illegal immigration, for instance, that, despite the will of California residents, continued to bleed state resources and slowly morph inland neighborhoods into veritable Third World mini-nations, linguistically and culturally cut off from the America we all know. The state’s body politic was a circus act, yet political clowns mostly left to their unnoticed devices due to the amazing wealth creation of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world-class ports, industry-leading small businesses, and large corporations that found a welcome home here. Taxes, in most cases, were much lower than what they are today but rising. The education system was in decline but we were still not at the bottom of the list.
There were areas in Los Angeles and the Bay Area that featured neo-socialist zoning laws, mandates, urban sprawl, crime, and moral decay, but again, such was mostly off the public radar at the time and not part of the typical California experience, like that which I lived.
Today when I happen upon a city left unexplored since my youth, Californias incredible decline is like a splash of icy-cold water early in the morning. Save for the highly sought after and prohibitively costly coastal areas and affluent inland neighborhoods, the California transformation into a socialist, Third World underworld is breathtaking. Once brimming and shiny urban areas from the Oregon border to south San Diego are wrought with crime and decomposition, bearing no visual difference to the myriad slums of Mexico. Businesses are shuttered or replaced with marijuana dispensaries. Foreclosure signs continue to litter middle-class streets everywhere. The collective mood is near-depression and the near-depression 22% unemployment rate is left unabated.
Much of the acceleration of this decline is due to the financial crisis of 2008 and the heavy blow dealt to the state as Sacramento central planners in the past looked forward to continual prosperity and left rainy day planning for another day. The depth and severity of this economic downturn makes it much different than the dot-com blowup of the 2000s and in fact a structural crisis — especially pertaining to the states pension system — that the state may never recover from.
State parks have been shuttered or put on the auction block to stave bankruptcy. A recent San Diego example of this situation points to this – the world famous Del Mar Fairgrounds, owned by the state of California, was under tentative discussion to be sold to the city of Del Mar for $120 million, an effort to raise cash for the bleeding state coffers. Conservative independent estimates of the land put the value at five times that and some estimates are close to a billion dollars. But California, like a homeowner in foreclosure, has no choice but to sell off this prized state land at a fire sale price.
With my own eyes in California I have witnessed the perils of socialism and top-down collectivist government, the havoc wreaked by a blind eye turned to the rule of law, and what creeping and crippling regulations and taxes do to a once-thriving middle class. Neo-Bolshevik state lawmakers beholden to radical special interests joined hands with a neutered opposition party to fleece the worlds 8th largest economy, and my state reminds us of the moral destruction that the entitlement mentality and unfettered entitlements create.
In what seems like a lifetime ago, Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform the nation. California is what a truly progressive government transformation looks like. Thus, in a sensible America, the decline of California would be the canary call in a coal mine for the nation. How can we let the progressive nightmare continue to happen to the nation when a state of almost 40 million (nearly a nation unto itself) has already experienced the disaster first?
Atlas has shrugged and California has changed – government has ruined this place and I will never forget it.
– Inspiration for this piece comes from Victor Davis Hansons National Review article, Two Californias.
John Adams, 2nd President of The United States
_____________________________
This is the key to understanding the decay that is consuming this nation. No government, of any type, is sufficient to restrain an unbridled sinner.
We had maximum freedom here because we largely restrained ourselves by the power of God in our lives. We have left the freedom that comes with self restraint for the bondage of law and government. Decay and dissolution is the only outcome of our current path.
Socialism isn’t only practiced by socialists. In the 1980’s, an acquaintance of mine tried to set up a needlepoint shop in a suburb of Los Angeles. This was to be a tiny, one-room enterprise.
The city government may have long been dominated by “conservative Republicans,” yet because of the fees and paperwork required by the city, she finally threw up her hands in disgust and gave up. Her dream of being an entrepreneur was strangled by red tape.
Tucson is a great town with lots to do, and it’s not even the conservative part of Arizona. Did you ever make it up to Prescott? Beautiful scenery, beautiful climate, and you will find few places in the country more congenial to a conservative.
My uncle came to the central coast in the 1930’s with nothing, and ended up as mayor of Solvang. I think he must have come closer to living the California dream than anyone I know. What a paradise on earth it was, populated by the best sorts of hardworking, politically conservative but personally adventuresome nation-builders.
Now it is a bankrupt, crime infested, Bolshevik Third World toilet. How surpassingly sad.
“Twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago California was a bountiful land of opportunity that beckoned all Midwesterners to foreigners”
BINGO they all came and F’ed it up.
The Reagan economy was just getting into second gear. Small businesses everywhere and everyone had a groove going on...
What remains now reminds me of the remanants of the "20th Century Motor Company" in Atlas Shrugged.
Californias financial problems are in a league of their own. But the same pressures that drove the Golden State toward fiscal disaster are wreaking havoc in a number of states, with potentially damaging consequences for the entire country.
Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=56044
Here is an odd notion: Mexican-Americans might actually end up being the saviors of California. To explain.
To start with, it wasn’t the Mexican-Americans or illegal Mexicans, or blacks, who screwed things up in California. It was their bountiful collection of crazy white people. They were the ones who embraced incredibly self-destructive, stupid and greedy laws.
They did not address problems, they cultivated problems, and invited ever growing numbers of their deficient kind to California, to revel in their spiritual Sodom and Gomorrah. And eventually they forced out those who remained who were sensible, hard working, and orderly.
Now, the flip side of this was Mexico, which like the rest of central and much of South America, suffers from what can be called, “Old Europe disease”. Its origins lie in the old, dead monarchies and nobility of Europe, whose philosophy of wealthy, elitist control over “the masses” still exists in the polytechnic-graduate hereditary Eurocrats.
In Mexico, about a dozen extended families control almost all of the national wealth and power. But unlike in America, where our billionaires and millionaires don’t mind company in prosperity, actively creating other wealthy people, in Mexico and parts south, there is a social and spiritual sickness that fights against equality of opportunity.
In short, “Old Europe disease” means that the wealthy keep all the wealth to themselves, go to lengths to keep everyone else poor, and can only enjoy their wealth when surrounded by grinding poverty.
In turn, this causes the masses to embrace radical egalitarian socialist and communist philosophies, that seek the overthrow this repugnant elite. Though invariably the leaders of the populists, like Chavez in Venezuela, discover their own lust for absolute power and control, and soon think of themselves as the new elites. And the disease continues, just with new faces at the top.
Be that as it may, it is not hard to imagine why Mexicans wish to leave that revolting order and come to America.
But here’s the rub. Most Mexicans are no dummies. They quickly learn that America is different. That there are no “Patrons” to call them “Peon dogs”. And that with hard work they can actually better their lot.
A persuasive argument. So it should be of no surprise that many Mexicans actually do both integrate and succeed in improving their lot through hard work.
And yet, turning full circle, this brings those Mexicans into *conflict* with the crazy white people in California.
Elsewhere in the US, where Mexican-Americans do not ghettoize, they integrate and prosper, just like sane white people. They do this because they are not oppressed by crazy white people.
So it is a good question. Since crazy white people have about destroyed the economy of California, and are utterly irresponsible about cleaning up their own mess, will eventually the Mexican-Americans step up to the plate and set things to order?
A good question.
My family probably got here in the 1930s, my grandfather was buried here in 1962, and my older brother was born here in the 1940s after the war.
Some people point out that California used to be Republican, but I think that was all it was, California has never been truly, genetically, conservative.
California was never a social conservative, Evangelical/Protestant type state, so liberalism was it’s destiny, even now the impotent Republican party here lacks any real core values, or a large core base of true conservatives to appeal to. There is no deep conservative foundation for a conservative movement to work with, like there was in the South.
If I didn’t know in my heart that as a US taxpayer, I’ll eventually wind up paying for all this, I’d say let them embrace their Democrat governance and slide into fiscal oblivion.
You weren’t ‘hikin’ all over the place in LA, either....I’d hazard to guess it’s the same near many urban areas. Once you get away from the bus lines and mass transit, incidences of crime go down significantly.
Try 1963. The introduction of the PILL killed morals and ethics with the young people who were rejecting their parents beliefs. And those who grew up in those times are now running the asylum...
You werent hikin all over the place in LA, either
When I was very young, my aunt had a second hand furniture store in Watts. 99% of her customers were black.
Big cities are never “safe”, but it wasn’t a war zone.
I hear you, but most likely different kind of Mayor and different kind of police force too....Atlanta used to be the same way before the early 70s when Maynard Jackson got elected.
Nice post. Liberals are happy to stay in their gated enclaves and their jobs in government and academia while everyone else suffers. Meanwhile as things get worse, the people who might be able to improve things leave. It’s a nasty cycle and it’s hard to see what breaks it.
Amnesty is a policy of creating more poverty in the United States. This isn’t because these immigrants aren’t hardworking; many are. Nor is it because they don’t assimilate; many do. But they generally don’t go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished. Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government’s poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent. Over the same period, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty rose 3 percent and the number of blacks, 9.5 percent. What we have now — and would with guest workers — is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals and housing; it feeds social tensions (witness the Minutemen).
Among immigrant Mexican and Central American workers in 2004, only 7 percent had a college degree and nearly 60 percent lacked a high school diploma, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Among native-born U.S. workers, 32 percent had a college degree and only 6 percent did not have a high school diploma. Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101146_pf.html
I lived in Oceanside for 20 good years (1967-87), then bailed as I felt the laws were like ever-tightening tentacles. A few years ago I visited my sister there and was stunned by the Third World appearance - crowds of non-English speaking everywhere and a general decline in the once beautiful Mediterranean atmosphere. Haven't been back since, but friends now talk of $400 electric bills where not much heating and no a/c is needed.
Raised in the Central Valley I remember when folks often forgot to lock their front door.
In the summer us kids would play outside, often 'til midnight due to the heat and parents were OK with it.
I live in a nice neighborhood in Sacramento now...mostly full of Govt employees...but you don't have to drive far to the slums.
Say what you will, but we STILL have the best weather in the nation. And the best produce and agricultural products anywhere.
Sadly, that's all we're the best at besides government growth.
Thanks.
What has happened out there breaks my heart. When I go out there, as seldom as possible anymore, I still feel the nostalgic pangs for a world lost. Sounds overly dramatic, but it is heartfelt. All of the family, what’s left of the last generation, my generation, the kids, and the grand kids are still there. Hoping to hold on to that that once was.
I have old high school and uni friends who are liberals. They know something is wrong, but just can’t admit that it is partially their fault. And, if you try to recite
fact to them, their reaction is prepubescent infantilelism. Purely reactive and emotional as I witnessed last week in Arroyo Grande with my old college roommate. I thought he was going to burst the capillaries in his eye balls when I tried to show him how, historically, the demonrats had destroyed the state.
It was pathetic.
I was thinking similarly - I’m 52 and if this thirtyish guy thinks he has seen changes, I’ve seen more.
I was born in St. Mary’s hospital in San Francisco in 1958. Timmy missed the entire “turn on, tune in, drop out” 60s that forged the personalities of the people in charge of the Socialist Party — um... I mean Democratic Party — today.
Timmy, I even predate the Gun Control Act of 1968. Talk about changes...
Yes Tim, you have seen a massive state collapse. You are lucky you’ve missed the earlier part I saw, just like I’m lucky I missed what came before. I can only imagine how nice San Francisco and Los Angeles were before World War II. Before the infestation. Before the transition to Gomorrah. Before insanity set in. Before the communists successfully infiltrated the church, the schools, Hollywood, the government, the scientific community, the media...
The only thing that surprises me is that a thirtyish guy gets it, and so clearly.
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