I’m a native of California. Though I no longer call it “home,” I still spend a few months there every year. And for sure I take a backseat to nobody in bashing what passes for a state government in Sacramento, it is a very bad joke.
All of that said, CA is still in so many ways the nicest year-round physical environment in these 50 states and several territories. Much of it is warm, but not humid, and gets lots of sunshine. Take your pick of the seashore or the mountains, or farm the great Central Valley and coastal flood plains, ski the Sierras while never slipping on ice and snow in your driveway.
People are claiming wildfires are something new, and disasters just a recent thing. Nope. Not the case at all. Paradise burning in the Camp fire was very bad, San Francisco burning after the earthquake over 100 years ago was worse.
Forest fires? Nothing new. I’m old and, too many decades ago as a kid in SoCal, I would watch forest fires burn off the national forest mountainsides above Ojai every second or third autumn. People persist in building out into the CA foothills close to nature, and “nature” turns around and bites them occasionally.
Our distant friends would call and ask, “Is your house in danger? We hear Ojai is burning.” We’d answer, “No, we’re fine, it never gets within miles of our house. The valley is fine.”
Tell me the Midwest and south don’t get awful killer tornadoes - basically unknown in CA. Or the southeast and its giant hurricanes, none in CA. Or blizzards, only up in the Sierras around Lake Tahoe, not tying up our cities like much of the country. And mind-sapping humidity, common every summer nearly everywhere east of the Rockies, not in CA.
What’s wrong with CA is bad politics, the same problem blessed-by-nature Argentina has. CA has the “blue state blues,” which seems an incurable malady. Once contracted, the ‘patient’s’ prognosis is poor.
In Venezuela, which has a terminal case, the only solution available to the individual resident is to leave. Ironically, those with the gumption to leave make the situation worse for those who remain.
