Thread: What makes California great?

Opinion - California Forum

The Conversation: What makes California great?

By Bruce Maiman
Special to The Bee
Published: Sunday, Sep. 12, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1E

What are California's best selling points, even in these troubled times? To comment on this issue, please use our forum.

This weekend marks 160 years since California became a state. Today, a century after Hiram Johnson and 50 years since Pat Brown, California has become a mess.

We know the usual suspects: a dysfunctional government, staggering debt and uninspiring political candidates; daunting issues like education, illegal immigration, infrastructure and an uncorrected corrections system. The barrage of bad news is relentless. The recession is just salt in the wound. With the fate of the Golden State appearing so grim, who even thinks to ask, "What's good about California?"

"It's a question I almost never ask myself," says Rebecca Cihak, an elementary school teacher in Rocklin. "But now that you've posed it, it's a great one to ponder."

I got that response a lot. We seem so distracted by the bad that we've forgotten about the good.

Not that I'm the best guy to raise this question. Native New Yorkers like me are born and bred to hate California, though mostly that means Los Angeles. And then, they move to Los Angeles and love it. Me? I'm ambivalent.

Everyone mentions the weather, often credited as a critical piston in the state's economic engine, but Claudia French, executive director of the California Museum, says, "If it was just the weather, why isn't Florida a zenith of creativity and innovation?"

Maybe we should ask what is California and how it came to be.

The weather actually provides a clue. We have only two seasons a year – wet and dry – but you don't have to go far to find every possible climate condition, from glaciers to deserts, and maybe even a jungle, if you count the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour.

"I can do just about anything within a few hours," says Joanna Walters, a New York transplant now living in Truckee. "World-class skiing, rock climbing, mountain biking, sailing, abalone diving, surfing and backpacking."

That's California's topography talking, which provides another clue. It seems almost confrontational: Ocean shores barter with the highest peak in the lower 48 (Mount Whitney) at 14,505 feet and the lowest point on the continent (Death Valley) at 282 feet below sea level. For a relatively arid state, almost 40 percent of California is forestland.

"It's the diversity," praises Gerry Storey of Sacramento, who, like many Californians, grew up in the monochromatic Midwest and, after a stint in the Air Force, landed in California, eyes widened by a plenitude of ethnic cultures. Others like Sally Ertl, a fourth-generation Californian from Orangevale, have roots going back to the 19th century and an extended family that includes "Mexican, black, Asian, German, Russian … we're a true Heinz 57 family," she says.

Diversity is at California's core, the state DNA; a cultural bouillabaisse enhanced by a broad range of natural beauty, seized upon by leaders and laborers from all corners who contributed the state's many great man-made achievements.

California's cultural diversity arose from the lure of commerce and wealth. Overnight, the state transformed industrially and infrastructurally as people with brainpower and business sense came to accommodate a wave of dreamers in pursuit of the state's bounty: first gold, then oil, then agriculture.

In the early 20th century, visionaries deemed California best for the emerging motion picture industry. Like dominoes, new entertainment mediums followed: radio, records, television, video, CD, DVD and digital, all of which conspired to define the state's image and attract people to it.

Donne Levy, a retired college professor who lives in Sacramento, recalls one of his students born in Germany and raised on the Beach Boys and Hollywood. "To his generation, America meant California," and California meant the "good life." Hotels, motels, beaches, drive-ins, backyards and barbecues; "sportswear" was coined here during the Depression. A business setting up shop in California could have the pick of the litter from a job pool filled with people who see weather and the good life as one.

Yet, it's remarkable that California ever worked at all. Like the New Yorker who moves to the place he hates and ends up loving it, the state is full of strange bedfellows that seemingly don't belong in the same room.

Only here can we induct Ronald Reagan and Caesar Chavez into the California Museum's Hall of Fame in the same year – 2006; a union buster and a union leader.

We elected Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown, and after electing another actor, we just might elect Jerry Brown again.

We launched a surfer generation and generations that never go outside because they're busy surfing online.

The most populous state in the union uses less energy per capita than any other state in the country, according to a federal climate study, defying the international image of American energy gluttony in the capital of our national car culture.

We gave birth to the Partridge Family and the Manson Family, Disney in Anaheim and the world's porn capital in the San Fernando Valley, just 50 miles away. You could see Goofy and get goofy all in one day.

We're the land of fruits and nuts but home to some of the world's finest academic, research and medical institutions: Stanford, UCLA, UC Davis and Berkeley, for starters. Even with a 32 percent tuition hike, the annual 10 grand tab facing a UC student this fall still costs far less than in-state tuitions at countless universities of similar pedigree (with much colder weather, incidentally).

Rick Warren's Saddleback is one of America's best-known megachurches, yet 21 percent of Californians say they have no religious affiliation, according to the Pew Research Center, a higher percentage than any other state.

We feed the world with almost 300 different agricultural commodities and bountiful fisheries, yet we host a plethora of people obsessed with being pipe-cleaner thin.

Pundits prattle about Americans isolating themselves into little cocoons of like-minded strongholds. Not here. If a culture lives on the planet, you'll find it in California. Somehow, all these components that seem at cross-purposes with one another work in consonance with each other with an energy as restless as our tectonic plates, creating and innovating at a dizzying pace in dozens of fields: engineering, entertainment, science, aerospace, medicine, electronics, high tech and now, biotech. Much of what happens in California happens in the United States, but later.

This rich mélange of human varietals is one reason, I think, why so many who are so different can work together to accomplish so much – what California's premier historian Kevin Starr calls, the "ecumenopolis": polarities in the extreme working for common purpose.

"That to me has been the true beauty of California," says Storey, "the cultural heritage and human racial mix, and its willingness to accept all peoples of the world to participate in this grand experiment."

If you think about it, this grand experiment called California is a microcosm of the American ideal envisioned by our Founding Fathers: People of free will and of all stripes who go forth and prosper. California gets trashed by all these flyover states that wear their patriotism on their sleeve, but no state represents America's pluralistic society better.

Yes, we have serious problems. No one can say if California will survive as the most dynamic state in the union, but there's a superb piece of good news that comes with the all the negatives we bemoan daily: Nearly all our problems come down to governance, and that's something we can fix. We can elect different people and demand the necessary systemic changes – all of that is up to us.

Is it likely? Maybe not.

Possible? Definitely!

But with all the blessings of California's diversity, isn't it interesting that its only curse has no diversity at all. The problem is government, and citizens can change it.

We can't change the weather, the topography, the agriculture or California's distinguished record of leadership in so many fields of endeavor. Why would we want to? But the things that are wrong are things we can fix, and that might be the best thing of all about California: We can fix what's broken. There's no need to touch the rest.

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/12/302043 ... tfrom.html

Looks nice on a cartoon storyboard but nobody can ever "FIX" California.

"Fixing" implies that there is a correct version of something and California is about as far from "correct" as you can get. Instead, it's a twisted snarl of every contrasting element you can think of and has cost it's residents a massive fortune because of all the accommodations it performs to satisfy the population/commerce monsters. Rational people out here are basically friendly in public, thanks in part to the pleasant climate and diversity awareness, but as far as identity and security are concerned, most retreat to their neighborhood residential confines in defense of their sanity. And it's actually a dangerous place compared to middle America. And deteriorating from over consumption.

If you ever want to live in "culture shock", move here.

I love living in San Diego.

I used to really like living in Long Beach too.

(There are some places in CA. that I choose not to live.)

If I wasn't happy living here I would leave.

Life is to short to live some place that you aren't happy.

And it's to easy to pack and move to be miserable all of the time.

Originally Posted by ShockedinCalifornia

Looks nice on a cartoon storyboard but nobody can ever "FIX" California.

"Fixing" implies that there is a correct version of something and California is about as far from "correct" as you can get. Instead, it's a twisted snarl of every contrasting element you can think of and has cost it's residents a massive fortune because of all the accommodations it performs to satisfy the population/commerce monsters. Rational people out here are basically friendly in public, thanks in part to the pleasant climate and diversity awareness, but as far as identity and security are concerned, most retreat to their neighborhood residential confines in defense of their sanity. And it's actually a dangerous place compared to middle America. And deteriorating from over consumption.

If you ever want to live in "culture shock", move here.

It was culture shock every time I visited California on business or pleasure. I recall walking downtown Santa Monica with a co-worker about 2 yrs ago when we were there for a legal deposition. Out of the blue he said "It doesn't feel right here...I don't belong". I felt the same way. I've felt that way every time I've been there. But I have to say, I've lived in Texas all of my life except for a short stint in San Diego. It never felt "friendly" to me there. I felt like I was always looking over my shoulder. People here in Texas seem to be so much friendlier and more independent. I'll never forget the time in San Diego I had someone tell me that there were about five hispanic males in the parking lot of my hotel "casing" out my room. I noticed them as well and they didn't seem to belong there. They disappeared when I notified hotel security of the suspicious behavior.

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