Golden No Longer: Is California Doomed?

Golden No Longer: Is California Doomed?

Beneath the surface of showy glitter, California is becoming a hollow shell, with rising poverty, crumbling infrastructure, sky-high taxes, and a fleeing middle class. ...
William F. Jasper

About a dozen years ago, on a return flight to California from the East Coast, this writer chanced to be seated next to two lovely elderly ladies. They were sisters, and like most Americans of my parents’ generation had been acquainted with hardship during the Great Depression years. That’s when their family had headed to California. After their father lost their family dairy farm in Minnesota, the chatty sisters explained, he decided their best option was to join the great migration to “the Golden State.” So, they piled all their belongings onto their old farm truck and it was “Westward Ho!”

“To us, California really was the golden state,” one of the sisters recounted, her face aglow at the memory. “We didn’t have much when we got there. We lived in a tent for quite a while, but we didn’t mind. Everything was so new, exciting and magical: palm trees, the ocean, citrus groves — and lots of warm sunshine, not like the blizzards and hard winters we left behind in Minnesota.” “Everybody called us ‘Okies,’” the other sister chimed in, “but we had never even been to Oklahoma; that’s just what they called all of us homeless folks back then.” The whole family worked, picking oranges and other produce, and doing whatever odd jobs they could. It was a challenging time, but still a very happy one, they recalled. Their affectionate reminiscences of California in the 1930s, albeit as seen through the eyes of young girls, and evoked fondly in memories softened by age, belie the relentlessly grim images we associate with the Grapes of Wrath era. Their father, utilizing his farm machinery-repair skills, eventually landed a steady job as a mechanic. Within a few years, he had his own prosperous auto-mechanic shop in Orange County, and the family soon bought a modest home in a nice middle-class neighborhood. And, said the ladies, most of the other folks they knew in like circumstances also pulled through in similar fashion. That was, indeed, a golden time, they said. In more recent years, however, that glow and shine has begun to fade, to the point where now, they opined, the state might be tarnished beyond repair and headed toward collapse.

Why did these 20th-century California “pioneers” hold such a bleak outlook toward the future of their adopted state? The catalog of ills the ladies rattled off was not surprising: out-of-control state government spending, high taxes, drugs, crime, gangs, failing schools, massive illegal immigration, decaying roads and infrastructure, rampant homosexuality and immorality, total erosion of manners and civility, increasing racial animosity, and more. In virtually all of these areas, conditions have worsened in the dozen years or so since that conversation. These afflictions are not unique to California, but the state does magnify and concentrate these ills to such a degree that millions of Americans, including millions of Californians (and ex-Californians), share this pessimistic assessment of the state’s future.

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