I have a deep dark secret to confess: I’m from California. My parents moved there when I was 10 years old, and I resided in the Golden State until I was 30, when my husband and I moved away. I seldom mention this fact to anyone.
The reason I keep this information quiet is because the taint of Californication has followed us around for the past 25-plus years. Not just us; it follows everyone who leaves the Golden State behind. Let’s face it, people hate Californians.
Why? Perhaps the answer can be found in a lament by Diana Helmuth entitled, “If San Francisco is so great, why is everyone I love leaving?”
Helmuth states, “We are witnessing two migrations: One is a continuation of the California dream. The other no one talks about, though it affects nearly everyone I know.” The poignant article begins as Helmuth says goodbye to her best friend of 16 years, an artist, as her friend departs for greener pastures – in Pittsburgh, where the living is more affordable for artistic types.
She follows by noting the hostility toward Californians in other cities: “You can also easily find a band of locals bemoaning, specifically, the ‘[bleeping] Californians’ who are flooding their home, driving up rents, installing yoga studios, polluting the local vibe with new technology, and generally making everything suck while sipping kale juice. We’re threatening Austin’s weirdness and erasing Bozeman’s cowboys. We seem to be everywhere you look, ruining other cities, apparently by not staying where we ought to – back in California.”
Naïve and innocent, Ms. Helmuth seems unaware WHY locals have this inexplicable hostility toward Californians. After all, doesn’t everyone love higher rents, yoga studios and kale juice? But is it the yoga and kale juice, or is it something else? Helmuth doesn’t get it.
“I am also proud to be part of a liberal community that is trying to be a safe zone for people who would otherwise be persecuted in other parts of the country or the world,” she writes. “To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense. The Californians who are coming in and ‘ruining’ your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite. They have been kicked out of their own backyards” by the wealthy corporations.
See? Clueless.
No one is offended by kale or the yoga. It’s the attitude. It’s the lobbying to turn their new home in other states into a sanctuary city. It’s banning of the pronouns “he” and “she.” It’s California lawmakers who think it’s a good idea to add Planned Murderhood’s phone number to student IDs, including students at private or Christian schools. (Hint: If you think this is a good idea, that’s why people hate you. Stay where you are.) It’s the pornographic “sex ed” programs public schools force on all students. It’s the hostility toward family values, faith, limited government and everything else that’s turning California into a hellhole. In short, it’s the propensity – over and over, every time, without exception – for liberal California refugees to turn their new home into a duplicate of the cesspool they left behind, and then to moan about it.
Californians have an unnatural inclination to embrace anything new and untried, regardless of how well the old and true methods worked. It’s no accident the flamboyant experimentation of the ’60s rooted itself with vigor in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s why emigration from the state has become a verb – to Californicate – when people leave and settle in another place and promptly begin implementing the failed policies that led to their fleeing California in the first place. We witnessed this firsthand during our decade in southwest Oregon. Californication now refers as much to attitude as to geographical origin.
California embodies the Robert LeFevre quote, “Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” It’s a state that never says it’s sorry for any ill-fated government program it introduces, and refuses to admit that anything could possibly be wrong with its progressive logic (or illogic, as the case may be). It’s the loony-tune ideas, like high-speed rail that costs a fortune, fail, but somehow becomes part of the mainstream Green New Deal as a fabulous idea that’s sure to work next time, even after California admitted they can’t afford it.
“Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left,” notes columnist Victor Davis Hanson.
It’s no wonder people are fleeing the Golden State in droves. What is the incentive to stay when taxes are sky-high, regulations are draconian and capricious, crime is rampant, infrastructure is crumbling, politicians are so out of touch with reality they think they can make it illegal to shower and do laundry on the same day, and the state as a whole is on the cusp of catastrophe and has no margin for error?
And what special brand of “keep-banging-my-head-on-this rock-until-it-quits-hurting” insanity keeps the outward-bound Californista from recognizing the failed state model that drove him forth won’t be welcome where people understand that gender isn’t a lifestyle choice? They’re only trying to do good, you see. They just want to tutor the poor ignorant locals to get in touch with their feeeeeelings rather than bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles. They’re just here to help.
These Californians have an enormous disconnect between cause and effect. They don’t recognize that the effect of gun confiscation is skyrocketing violent crime, or that shutting down economic opportunities means unemployment. They never seem to “get” that the progressive policies they endorse cause the pollution, out-of-control spending, regulations and taxes that chased them out of California to begin with.
It saddens me to watch California’s accelerating crash-and-burn. It saddens me that a state that was once a golden land of opportunity for millions – including my parents, back in 1972 – is now a state people must flee to seek opportunity.
So yeah, this is why people hate Californians. It can be unfair, of course. Many conservative refugees emerge from the state, coughing socialist pollution out of their lungs, and go on to lead productive lives in new communities without feeling the compulsion to drag along failed liberal agendas. They overcome the natural distrust they encounter by behaving like productive adults and not delinquent demanding demented adolescents.
So if you’re a liberal, please – I beg you – stay put. No one wants your progressive sewage. It’s infectious.
