The Bear Flag Republic
Sometime in the 1960s, as Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys composed their odes to surfing and the Golden State, they wrote and recorded a lesser known ditty—“California Calling.” As is typical of their music, the song speaks of endless waves, golden light, surf board laden woodies driving the old highways, and beautiful women. California, the Beach Boys claimed, beckoned to everyone, inviting the country to heed the call and ride the ultimate wave.
These days though it seems popular to denigrate California, to call it “unsustainable” as a recent New York Times columnist did, to chide the state’s inhabitants for their problems with homelessness, income inequity, crowds and cost. And there are those, like the President, who declare open war upon the state for its fires (and supposedly unswept forest floors), its taxes, and its liberalism.
So I just want to come down squarely in the camp of the Beach Boys and everyone who has ever celebrated the Bear Flag Republic. There’s a reason there are so many songs about California.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the issues. The state is largely a desert, often afflicted by decades of drought. We have earthquakes and greedy power companies who start fires with their ancient equipment and simultaneously cut off electricity to the citizenry and then over charge us on our subsequent bills. We have cliffs that the ocean erodes and we have what now seems to be a permanent fire season.
The fires.
On a single day in October my family faced potential evacuation warnings (get ready to get out) from three different fires. The last call came in the middle of the night and I’m still struggling now to find sleep.
Homeslessness nearly everywhere in California is heartbreakingly apparent. But I think it is an issue in nearly every major city in the country. (And it might be fair to note that many social scientists contend that California’s problem was started by a certain movie star governor, who went on to be president, when he altered laws regarding mental illness).
Taxes—the right says California pays way too much and that people are leaving the state as a result and the left says taxes are way too low (especially property tax since the passage of Proposition 13 and, for the record, I tend to agree) and that people are leaving the state. But let’s pause and think for a second what those taxes have funded–world class education, transportation systems, art and a string of jewel like state parks. And truthfully, one reason our state taxes might seem burdensome is that under the president’s so-called “tax cut” Californians can no longer apply their stat tax as a federal deduction.
I get it.
But I don’t think I ever want to live anywhere else. (O.K. Maybe briefly in Paris or on the coast of Portugal.)
My state pride begins in the political. California is a symbol of resistance to the current corrupt and repressive regime in Washington D.C. We embrace diversity in all of its manifestations. We have enacted the most far reaching legal efforts to deal with climate change. We have a balanced budget with a sizable surplus.
In California we can eat lettuce—fresh, just picked lettuce from the farmers’ markets—all year long.
Despite the suggestion that we ought to all live in high rise buildings (that in his description rather resemble space stations), California is still a farm state. Nearly 20% of the nation’s food and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts come from the Golden State.
Not to honk my horn about the obvious but California is also the state where you can drive from the ocean to the desert to the High Sierras in a single day’s ride, where the physical terrain is just awesomely lovely. Just saying these words is evocative: Highway 1, Yosemite, the redwoods, Golden Gate, Joshua Tree, Anza Borrego.
And the beach. Just like the Beach Boys said, from La Jolla, to Redondo, to Ventura, to Santa Cruz, the ocean is a way of life.
We are a state defined by creativity—a creativity demonstrable in film and entertainment, in technology, in music, in culinary shifts, in every kind of design from fashion to architecture, in literature and art.
I think about the people I know who are working on water reclamation projects, about lawyers (shout out to you sister-in-law) who do pro bono legal immigration work, and I think about the fire captain who came by my house at 3 AM one night during the fires and patted my arm and taught me how to “read a fire.” One of the facts that emerges from this last fire siege was how amazingly effective California’s fire fighters were. Despite historic high, hurricane strength winds, epic dryness and omnipresent flames, they controlled the fires with a relatively small (not that it’s ever really small) loss of life and property. This is an innovative place. It’s a place that has historically found solutions.
And yes, we practice yoga, eat kale and are sensitive to both our psyches and our auras.
We are deluded by our mythology of space some people argue. In the best seller Green Metropolis David Owen insists that green living can only be efficiently embraced in big cities with everyone living communally in small spaces. No cars. No lawns. While I understand Owen’s point, I find the idea of everyone living in vast high rise buildings—like dormitories on some science fiction planet—not utterly compelling. The suburban and even rural dream came from the idea that too many people clustered together becomes finally stultifying and suffocating. Rats that are over crowded in scientific experiments eat their young and indulge in other antisocial behaviors.
I picture my father fresh from the Depression in the midwest and then from the shores of Normandy. After finally arriving in California he would sit in the evenings on his concrete patio, martini in a blue toned glass and watch the rain bird sprinklers drift across his lawn. He was home. That vision may be quaint and nostalgic today but it remains an ideal. We drive too much—even in our electric cars, but somehow space and movement are components of our innovative abilities.
California is the place that almost elected Upton Sinclair governor, that developed the world’s most sophisticated highway system and (arguably) the most successful state university system. California was central in developing the Apollo and space programs. California is the world’s fifth largest economy, and lest all these achievements seem to be only in the past California is also the place developing the technology for renewable and sustainable energies. We provide sanctuary for the helpless.
Like the Beach Boys said, here in California we’re “on permanent vacation” and searching always for that ultimate wave.
Today Californians raise the Bear Flag once again, in revolt and in resilience.
“If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californi-a…”
Just call me a California girl.