Forty years ago I drove across the United States in mid-winter blizzards and traversed the state line into California’s blissful warmth and light. Struck by the sudden transformation I stopped the car and knelt down to kiss the earth that had been so blessed. Promised land indeed. No blood-soaked, rock-strewn desert here, just lush green fields and undulating hills stretching to the sparkling Pacific. A state blessed not only with stunning topography but with a diverse, hugely talented population, a top-tier educational system, and a culture of freewheeling, sky’s-the-limit innovation. We cruised the sinuous curves of Highway 1 on the jaw-dropping Big Sur coastline crooning, “California Dreamin’”.
Fast forward four decades and that dream has turned to nightmare. On July 1, facing a $24 billion budget shortfall, the state began issuing thousands of contractors IOU’s that major banks warned they wouldn’t honor. California’s celebrity governor, Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger, had presided over the termination of the state’s fiscal viability. But the origins of this calamity are more deeply rooted, in contradictory and delusional states of mind as much as institutional dysfunction. Hyper-individualism, self-indulgence, and the dreamer’s contempt for everyday realities and responsibilities have all produced a political system of epic paralysis.
The most diverse state in the Union, California is also the most culturally and politically divided. Eco-liberals in the North face off against right-of-Reagan conservatives in the South, no-tax libertarians and a vast, frustrated underclass of Latinos and African-Americans that services this affluent minority. Add to this emulsion several key policies, most of them enacted by voters through the initiative process, that have left the state increasingly incapable of meeting the obligations those voters expect it to fulfill:
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Proposition 13, a 1978 voter-enacted law, slashed the property taxes that funded the state’s top-flight educational system and other services, in the absence of which its schools have plummeted to the bottom of national rankings. A large proportion of California students graduate from high school – if they graduate at all – altogether unprepared to participate in a twenty-first century economy.
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A 1994 “three strikes” law enacted by crime-wary voters converted thousands of minor offenders into “lifers” and swelled the prison population 82 percent in the past 20 years. The prison system now houses 170,000 inmates and costs taxpayers $13 billion a year, more than all the state’s colleges and universities.
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The initiative process itself, instituted in 1911 to give voters direct democracy in combating railroad trusts, has since been captured by “grasstops” industry lobbies that use it to confuse voters into enacting regressive policies the legislature would never pass.
Yet the legislature itself is a study in institutional incompetence. Riven by partisan divides, the state’s apportionment system militates against compromise, electing only the more extreme elements of the electorate. To make matters worse, tax increases, now desperately needed to fill the yawning budget shortfall, can only be enacted with a two-thirds vote of the legislature. This stipulation gives minority anti-tax Republicans lethal veto power over any tax increases.
Watching California’s woes, the rest of the country and world, long both envious and resentful of the state’s outsized share of good fortune, gain a certain satisfaction in seeing confirmation of their skepticism. Like privileged perennial six-year-olds, Californians can be both child-like and childish. And like the United States as a whole, the state’s eccentricities and enthusiasms often charm a world that long ago dispensed with golden dreams. But the larger world also delights in watching the wax wings propelling the state’s flights of fancy, like Icarus, melted by flying too close to the sun.
And now, drowning in its sea of red ink, the state must close most of its parks, radically slash educational budgets and health care services for the poor, furlough stae employees and curtail crucial government operations, and release thousands of prisoners from jail. No one can calculate the cumulative impacts of these unprecedented measures. But it’s already clear, as it is for the U.S. as a whole, that we are at childhood’s end. Some observers say an increasingly under-educated populace, disincentives for business development, and decaying public infrastructure and services will drive away the kinds of catalytic initiatives that have traditionally made the state a magnetic field of dreams. Will the state – and state of mind – that gave us Google, iPhones, and the modern environmental movement, among many playful and profound innovations, finally grow up and dispense with childish things?
Not likely anytime soon. For better and worse, California remains a state of both dreams and denial. It’s always evoked both the best and worst human impulses, attracting both dreamers and schemers, visionaries and scam artists. And it still hatches new movements like rabbits out of a hat: California cuisine and organic supermarkets, social networks, renewable energy experiments (though increasingly upstaged by other states and countries), an irrepressible culture of innovation. One of the most enduring and endearing sources of its inspiration is its open-hearted embrace of newcomers. Arrive here and you’re home. No one asks who your parents were or what they did. You can still birth a world-shaking new idea here and find enough like-minded eccentrics to help you deliver it. And you can still fail, openly and ingloriously, and come right back without shame or regret to try again. The once and future California will never cease being golden. And like gold, it will never cease attracting dreamers, knaves and fools.
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Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).
