The destruction of California's future cannot be blamed on the hoards of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, illiteracy, or the mismanagement of our natural resources. It came about because California's political system was operating precisely in the manner it was designed by those with roots in the Marxist counterculture.

Well-meaning people with little knowledge of human nature, history, economics, and science. People who believed that Californians could be persuaded by a system of incentives and penalties to surrender their freedom for the greater good of the collective society.

People willfully blind to the metastasizing malignancy of political corruption that saw the special interests, such as developers, financiers, industrialists, and the various trade unions take control from the do-gooders to feather their own nests. Made worse by a “go along to get along” GOP that simply refuses to uphold existing laws and deal with the political corruption that surrounds them. Resulting in politicians whose spouses, family, and friends became wealthy exploiting the access, favors, and opportunities unavailable to those who lacked the influence to sell.

Over time politics turned from an honorable public duty to a well-paying profession.

No longer did these professional politicians serve their constituents, state, or nation. They served themselves, their political parties, and the special interests. Continually merchandising access and favors to ensure a continual supply of campaign funds to perpetuate their political power. If not in the offices subject to term limits, then on well-paying boards, panels, and commissions that provided their daily sustenance until the time they could, once again, reach for a bigger, better, brighter political future.

Many believed that the state's future involved STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

That rational rather than emotional or political decision-making would prevail. But they were wrong. A miscalculation of enormous effect. Their mistake was assuming that the new leaders of the STEM movement were not products of the very system that is responsible for the continuing cataclysmic destruction of the State of California. Most of these leaders are progressives, the same strain of Marxist-influenced individuals that were replicated in the progressive petri dish of America's educational process.

We are facing the darkest days of the 21st century; with environmentalists attempting to scale back our standard of living; the social justice crowd trying to redistribute wealth, and the politicians becoming even more corrupt as the courts refuse to hold them to account with our constitutional checks and balances.

I heard an environmentalist explain that the state's destructive wildfires which were ravaging large swaths of lands were the result of global warming. When I pointed out that massive wildfires were inevitable; nature's way of controlling the cycle of death and renewal, he called me a denier. I further explained that man's encroachment into ecologically dangerous areas -- with politicians subverting zoning and building codes to put more people at risk -- simply raising the human and financial costs of fire in a most unnatural way. And, that protective and preventative measures to reduce the fuel load, and the size and spread of fires, was almost universally condemned by the Marxist-infiltrated environmental crowd.

I challenged him to explain why a developer was allowed to build a high-rise five hundred yards from a known fault because their paid geologists said that the "fault was too old to be considered active." Of course, California has a law that "defines faults that ruptured within the last 11,000 years as active." Sheer madness in terms of geologic time and the unpredictability of earthquakes that can strike anywhere at any time. Whoops, one of California's most costly earthquakes (Northridge) occurred on an unknown fault and had it happened in Los Angeles, it would have been catastrophic.

I asked him to explain why a large swath of California's productive agriculture area, as well as lives and related businesses, was allowed to die to divert fresh water to the ocean in order to protect a scientifically-worthless fish?

Or why the State of California insisted on reducing the number of water retention dams and reservoirs that will exacerbate the natural cycles of deluge and drought?

Or why the State is attempting to destroy our roads in favor of mass transit and crowds the population into potentially dangerous high rises?

What is so terrible about individual freedom? Or the capitalist system that allows individuals to keep more of the fruits of their labor?

He walked away.

Bottom line ...

As long as the progressives are in charge of California, you can expect the state to self-destruct. As creators leave the state to subsidized consumers. As the tax base erodes leaving fewer and fewer people to sustain the costs of both the government bureaucracy and their corrupt unions. As the middle class (a Marxist term used only for reference) dies; leaving only the uber-wealthy or the poor.

Misery in the absence of real danger or hardship -- or self-imposed misery you have accepted without complaint is INSANE!

We are so screwed.

-- steve