“The vitriol one sees from red states regarding this on FR is amazing to me.”
I appreciate what you say. I was born in California in 1940, and save a couple of years where my mother and I moved to Utah to live with my fathers relatives while he was in Australia serving in the US Navy, I’ve been here all my life. And I can tell you that I consider it my life’s greatest positive experience to have been able to grow up here in the 1950’s and 60’s. California was ( and in many respects still is) an amazing place. Unfortunately WWII brought us the seeds of our current destruction, in the form of workers for the war materiel producers. When the war ended, they stayed and formed the nucleus of the welfare recipients since the jobs for which they came went away and there really wasn’t anything for them to do. But hey, California is such a nice place, why go back to the South where the weather is the $hits, right. We had a guest worker program for Mexican nationals to come here and work in agriculture, which was then our biggest business. But the Feds stopped that which started the illegal migration because the state’s needs and the Mexican workers needs were still there. So our demise has been at the collective hands of the Federal Government, a state government becoming the exclusive province of the RATS, and the steady influx of trash from south of the border.
To those “red state pontiffs,” I would say the following: If you don’t like what’s been happening here in California, I’d suggest you start looking around your own nest for the same seeds that were sowed here a generation or more ago. Further, you had better hope that somehow we recover from our current problems, because what has happened here is spreading and you can’t continue to move away from the problem. So rather than sitting there “clucking” about how California should drop into the Pacific, you had better hope we don’t, because Nevada will be next, and so on.
Well said. Many of them think they are immune, and keep telling them that a state border isn’t going to keep them out.
Even if they put up a fence, how are they going to keep liberals out? Give them a litmus test of some kind?
I'm sure it was nice in the 60s. My folks grew up in Oregon in the late 50s and early 60s and they say similar things. HOWEVER, their parents were from Oklahoma. They moved west because they wanted to WORK. The overwhelming majority went west to WORK. When they got to the Garden of Eden, California had illegally and unconstitutionally set up road blocks not allowing my family in, abusing and collecting legal US citizens.
So my grandfather, a Field Artillery vet, went to Oregon and worked as a logger until he was 65. Well, except for the time he fought in Europe. Yes, he rejoined the day after Pearl Harbor. My parents, sick of the left coast, moved us back to Oklahoma when I was 10.
California has been setting ITSELF up to fail. Don't blame "Southerners" for YOUR problems (unless you mean the "Southerners" y'all let in that *aren't* citizens - make that make sense). Have you seen Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas lately? Sure, the Oklahoma economy isn't as big is yours, but ours isn't broke. So don't blame us and our culture for California's historic and continuous anti-Constitutional stupidity.
BTW, our weather is just fine. The greatest outbreak of tornados couldn't do the damage to the economy of Oklahoma what your politicians have done to yours. Oh yeah, and we have WATER here. California has and always has had a Californian problem, not a "too many Southerners" problem.
I have cousins who spent their childhood in California and then moved to Arkansas. They’ve come out quite a bit for visits so they’ve seen slowly what has happened to California. They are now looking at the areas they live in and are seeing the same thing slowly happen there.