An age (indeed a coming of age) has passed since we hip East Coast girls and farmers' daughters looked up so much to the girls of California, as those Beach Boy surfers vocalized we should. If truth be told, we in the 49 states have grown up, as I'm sure you suspect, joking that California has remained a Neverland. It's the place where the odd and migrant go to live, a state that practices a politics of chaotic narcissism, leaving education ill-funded and litigation run amok.
We still love California for its beautiful sights – Yosemite, the coastline, the movie stars. But we have a bent toward staring at its fires and quakes and traffic and smog, too.
The reckoning is here, it seems, from your budget cataclysm. A people whose ancestors were told to go west and seek gold find it necessary to shake the glitter from their eyes. All things need equilibration: consuming leaves a piper to be paid, unleashed litigation chases out business, tax revolts leave common responsibilities in neglect. The stomping ground of the starlets has let out its beauty secret: Glory needs maintenance. Yin and yang are not just patterns on a pendant.
Please, sun-kissed ones, gather together the wits of your Legislature and the civic-mindedness of your populace. The fault line you (and we) face is in ourselves. Compromise. Moderate. Trade off. We pale-faced outsiders, deep down, want to see California mellow and balance like its finest wine. Good luck.
Dell Clark teaches and writes about American culture, families and kids. Among her books is "Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children's Myths in Contemporary America." Clark has lived in the Midwest and the East, but never in California.
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