Great idea.
California is so freakin messed up.
That’s the truth.
I’ll forget about it, but now that it’s on the calendar, the kids will say, “What’s this?” and I’ll say, “Aha! That means we’re going to have steaks and watch John Wayne movies and tell stories about your grandfather!” and they’ll be thrilled.
Our youngest daughter is named Kathleen after Maureen O’Hara’s character in “Rio Grande.”
“Messed up” does not begin to describe the chaos in California.
A territory blessed with a vast array of natural resources, and perhaps the most diverse topography in all of the United States, with the potential to be far greater than ever it has been, being drizzled away by the leeches and the parasites that have parlayed their hold on the control and restriction of the uses of these resources with the sometimes silliest and most facile of reasoning, not in any beneficial way.
California in its original and native ecological state was almost as barren as Egypt, but with the application of industry and logical thinking, the semi-desert of the Central Valley was made to be one of the most fertile regions on the entire planet, with potential for year-round harvesting and relative freedom from most of the hazards that dog the practice of agriculture elsewhere. Water, which was the main scarcity, was diverted from the run-off of the snow pack that came naturally to the Sierras in a reliable regular cycle, and held for slowed release, and the fertile soils of the lowlands yielded up bountiful harvests of just about every fruit and vegetable that grace the tables all over America and are (or were) regularly exported to other lands.
All this worked for decades, until some person, or group of persons, all of whom were singularly lacking in any kind of critical thinking, got a bug up their collective butts, and claimed that the land should “revert” to its original state. Some obscure and previously little noticed species were in danger of extinction, so goes the argument, and we must “restore” their habitat, at any cost.
I guess Horton heard a Who, and the chain of events, which now fetters and holds captive the entire state of California, was forged in board rooms and campus halls far from the site of all this wondrous success.