Charles C. W. Cooke writes for the New York Post about how California has replaced Florida as the butt of jokes about things being off-the-rails. He writes:
As a kid, I idolized California, which seemed, on my many visits there, to represent a sort of sunny, fun, innovative, middle-class paradise. But, somehow, the powers-that-be really have managed to screw it up.
Charles, I was a kid who lived and grew up in CA. Your visitor’s perceptions were dead accurate.
One couldn’t be more Californian than I was. I had parents who’d come there from other states, I was born in Hollywood (literally), displaced by a freeway, and from third grade on grew up in a small commercial SoCal orange orchard up the coast 50+ miles.
I wasn’t just typical, I was a CA stereotype although that thought never occurred to me-as-a-kid. I attended the then-excellent public schools, while I made the money for my first car trapping gophers out of orange orchards (gophers kill trees if left to thrive).
I drove that car to a basically free community college (a CA innovation) for two years. I transferred to a very inexpensive state university from which I graduated in two more years, and went to work in the aerospace industry while working on an MBA at night at that same university.
I got married, I got divorced, I remarried. I made my academic career working for the same state higher ed system where I earned my bachelors and masters.
CA was good to me in ways even I don’t totally comprehend. As a local I took it for granted.
All of that wonderfulness now has been corrupted by truly crap politics. I guess I’m still typical as a rueful ex-Californian who remembers when it actually was an “innovative, middle-class paradise.”
