San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
It hurts when California fails to meet its standards
I’ve been writing the It’s All Political column — and hosting a podcast of the same name — for five years, and you’ve seen it pop up on different days since then. Now that we’re moving to Sundays full time, I thought this might be the moment for a quick reintroduction.
You know the saying about how no one is more zealous than a recent convert? Same goes for those of us who moved to California. We love it more, often appreciate it more, because we weren’t lucky enough to be born here.
We defend California quicker and louder because we uprooted our lives to move thou
sands of miles to be here. We can’t understand why people would want to leave, because we believe with a convert’s zeal in the promise that California has long offered: This is the place not just to chase your dream, but to catch it. It is where you can be yourself and be with whom you choose to be with and say what you want, when you want and as loudly as you want. Unlike the places we left.
That’s why I moved here nearly 30 years ago. I believed all that. I still do.
So that’s why it hurts us converts more when California doesn’t live up to that promise. Like now.
Living the California dream is nearly impossible for anyone who isn’t already rich. Or, for the most part, white.
The dream isn’t attainable now for a skyrocketing number of residents who can’t buy a home or can’t afford rent unless they pack eight people into a twobedroom apartment. It is a sham to people who shake their head at $12 grilled cheese sandwiches or wonder who would pay $7 for a shot of pressed juice or who don’t shop at a perfumery like one I saw in the Mission District the other day.
People don’t shop at perfumeries in my beloved hometown of Pittsburgh. Nor do they in Milwaukee, where I lived before moving here. More prized than perfumeries in those places is a pickupyourlunchpailandgotowork ethic. It’s the same drive I hope to have inherited from my grandfather, who emigrated alone from southern Italy when he was 16 with no more than a fifthgrade education.
But while a bluecollar work ethic may prevail there, my hometowns fall short of California in other ways. There isn’t the diversity of people or thought in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee that there is here. There isn’t the overload of supersmart, creative minds anywhere that we find in the Bay Area. Nor the culture and community around social activism, that dynamic energy that makes the world better by showing us where we’ve screwed up — and how to be better.
My old hometowns don’t look like America. California does. Not what behindthecurve East Coasters call “the new America.” America right now.
That’s why it hurts us zealots more when California doesn’t live up to its promise. Because we’ve lived elsewhere, we know that California has so much potential — and yet we’re failing.
There aren’t as many people living on the streets in Pittsburgh as there are here. The public schools in just about every other state are in better shape. One out of every 5 children lives in poverty in California. Roughly 1 million Californians don’t have safe drinking water. We can’t control our wildfires or the power company that sparked many of them. And lately, we can’t distribute our COVID19 vaccinations as well as West Virginia.
At our worst, parts of California look like Third World countries — just miles from neighborhoods where people live like royalty.
That’s what’s frightening. We Californians love to brag that in 10 years, the rest of the country will be copying what we are doing today. Or, as the state’s highestranking native Californian, Gov. Gavin Newsom, likes to say, “California is America’s coming attraction.”
If that’s so, heaven help the rest of the U.S. Being ahead of the curve isn’t about California inspiring people in Pittsburgh to discover the joys of pressed juice in a few years. It’s about our failures becoming theirs. Unless we do something different. And we can.
For the past five years, this column (and my accompanying podcast) has been called “It’s All Political” for a reason. Everything we do — and everything we hope to change — has a political element to it.
People can march in the streets in support of Black lives, but structural change will come only through political solutions. Yes, change starts in the streets. Nothing makes a politician move faster than the threat of losing a job. But lasting change doesn’t happen unless laws are changed.
Our political system may be broken, but I remain optimistic that politics can be the route to change. Because I’ve seen it happen just in the time that I’ve lived here.
I’ve seen California evolve from a place where Gov. Pete Wilson won reelection in 1994 through a campaign that bashed Mexican immigrants into a state where Alex Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, serves in the U.S. Senate. I’ve reported on how grassroots activism changed California when it came to legalizing samesex marriage and legalizing cannabis in just a few years. Now we’re watching the beginnings of another evolution, as “defund the police” transforms from a chanted slogan into a different style of law enforcement.
So this is a way of reintroducing myself in this new Sunday spot. With an optimist’s heart and a cynic’s eye, I will continue to focus on holding the California political structure accountable to the promise of the California dream.
I will continue to tell the stories of the California dream through political figures — the leaders, the activists, the dissidents and the Dreamers. I will analyze how California emerges from the pandemic and, possibly, a campaign aimed at recalling the governor.
I will show how tech is changing the Bay Area even as many techies shelter in remote work, and how the legal cannabis industry isn’t always what we were told it would be. I will check to see whether politicians kept their promises made during the summer of racial reconstruction and call them out when their privilege is showing.
I will continue to track where Trumpism goes and where it takes the California Republican Party.
And, of course, there is Newsom. The governor who is emblematic of California in many ways. Someone with so much promise, but who is falling short of fulfilling it.
But I will also try to understand something else: Why are people leaving? To do that, I will ask the people who know best why California is falling short: the people who just left.
I will regularly feature their voices in something we call the California Exit Interview. It will be a way to better understand what’s going wrong here. And how we can get back to helping California fulfill its promise. Because I love it like a newcomer.