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by Victor Davis Hanson
Like that of many Third World countries, California’s
electrical grid can now fail with little notice. Rolling blackouts leave
households in the dark, university classes canceled, and families without
essential appliances. The most elemental responsibility of a humane and liberal
society – the ability to shield its citizenry from the age-old banes of
darkness and cold – we in California cannot always meet. We sue in the most
ingenious ways over the environmental and aesthetic consequences of power
production. We are eloquent in our endless debates in the state Legislature over
the wisdom of regulatory oversight. And we show moving public concern about the
effects of outages on our poor and aged.
But for all that rhetoric, we still cannot guarantee accessible and reasonably
priced heat, light and power to our citizens. Not since the robed philosophers
of Rome and Greece bickered and harangued each other by lamplight has history
seen such a sophisticated preindustrial society as our own.
California is no longer a public of 20 million or even 25 million souls, but
will soon exceed 35 million. For all our self-inflicted calamities, immigrants,
both foreign and domestic, are still pouring into the state. Something must soon
give in a sea of vast conflicting agendas. Our apparent birthright of sprawling
suburbs with rye lawns, pools, residential lakes, and golf courses cannot exist
alongside millions of acres of irrigated agriculture – at least not in the
Mediterranean climate and deserts of California. We can either water 30 million
Californians to surfeit, or continue to be the greatest food producer in the
nation; we can no longer do both.
Our underground aquifers are tapped and our mountain runoff long ago claimed.
Very soon, water shortages, rationing and astronomical price spikes will make
our current electricity calamity pale in comparison. Water, even more so than
power, is necessary for life – and for the good life it must flow in great
abundance. Meanwhile, Californians talk of restoring uninterrupted rivers and
streams for their rafts, fish, scenic hikes and bays. But they would do better
first to ensure that there will be enough water in their taps and toilets.
The effects of the impending crisis in education are not as obvious as darkened
streets and empty taps, but they reveal our state's same inability to act – as
well as the growing paradox between the lifestyle we demand and the honesty and
sacrifices we shun. California's institutions of higher education – the
marvelous tripartite system of junior colleges, state universities and elite
universities that was once the envy of the nation – are in paralysis. At some
California State campuses, 30% to 40% of the course offerings are now remedial
in nature. In response, we advocate ending the SAT as a criterion for admission.
Classes taught by part-time faculty nearly approach the number of those offered
by professors.
Since we will not, or cannot, open new campuses – our faculties are more
concerned about ethnic diversity and therapeutic curricula – there is no
guarantee that we can educate and train a new generation to maintain the next
link in the chain of an increasingly strained civilization. Just as we suck
power from other states for our insatiable electrical appetite, so perhaps we
will soon export our burgeoning youth to be educated by the rest of you.
Our transportation woes mirror the sorry state of our universities. That our two
great airports, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are habitually backlogged and in
dire need of expansion is no surprise, given the dysfunctional nature of
American air travel these days. But our highways may be in even worse shape.
Quite literally we have no continuous north-south freeway of three lanes in the
entire state.
The older U.S. 99 and 101 freeways are in places not free at all, little more
than highways laced with cross traffic – one potted and patched right lane
clogged by a caravan of trucks, the left a nightmarish obstacle course as cars
dodge trucks passing other trucks. Our third artery, Interstate 5, is more a
collapsed vein, in most places no wider than when it served 20 million
Californians two decades ago. Perhaps Californians can make movies and boutique
wines, but we apparently cannot guarantee safe and expeditious travel.
What has happened to our beloved state? We were not always so impotent and
confused in the face of problems with power, water and education. A drive along
the central coast of California reveals massive though aged electrical
generators at Moss Landing, Morro Bay and Diablo Canyon, impressive workhorses
our forefathers built to ensure long ago that we might have power today. In
contrast, we have not constructed a sizable generator in over a decade. For us,
such factories are either too dirty, dangerous, costly or unsightly – or
perhaps, in comparison with movies, wine and computers, merely boring
enterprises better left to the less sophisticated in Utah, Nevada and Oregon.
Our network of Sierra Nevada dams and canals was once the most sophisticated in
the world, as our forefathers sought to ensure a California of 10 million people
plentiful irrigation, hydroelectric power and recreational lakes. In contrast,
our generation not only builds no more dams, but fantasizes instead of tearing
down those that were bequeathed so that more Sierra runoff might reach the
ocean. Very soon we Californians shall learn that summers can be dark, dry and
hot all at once.
Over 30 years ago, we founded almost simultaneously three university campuses at
Irvine, San Diego and Santa Cruz; today, after years of delay and concerns over
strange species of shrimp and rare grasses, we cannot even start construction on
a single proposed new campus at Merced. True, California State University at
Monterey recently opened – but only because the federal government gave the
state the free land and infrastructure of the old military base at Fort Ord. It
remains to be seen whether its trendy curriculum of new-age technologies, “human
communication” and multicultural studies will attract students in desperate need
of a traditional liberal education.
Californians today are not like those of old who matched the state’s natural
beauty and bounty – timber, oil, farmland, temperate weather – with their own
courage, genius and strength to create an oasis. Now we dream and enjoy rather
than build. Yet our comfortable lifestyle and romantic ideology are claiming the
wages of our inaction and sloth.
We took for granted instantaneous, cheap electricity, but not dams, generators
or nuclear plants – to do so would have suggested that we were unkind to the
environment or did not enjoy the natural beauty of white water and alpine air.
We became infatuated with large sport utility vehicles and luxury pickup trucks,
but not equally so with either freeways to accommodate such monstrosities or the
oil wells to fuel them.
In one sense, we were parasites who lived off the work of our forefathers and
the gifts of nature. And our unearned affluence spawned a smugness of the worst
kind: Given water, power, universities and roads by others, we dawdled,
pontificated and nuanced about the particulars of our own utopia. The result of
this California disease is that we can save a newt but not always guarantee
power in the library.
We are told that California is moving away from its traditional mainstays of
agriculture, construction and manufacturing to an economy of tourism,
entertainment and service. No doubt. But what is forgotten in such a shift is
that we are losing a type of Californian and a credo that once made us what we
were. Before you enjoy the new age of dot-coms, drive in all-terrain cars, and
equip your suburban house with new-age gadgets – and feel guilty in the
abstract about the cultural, environmental and social consequences of such
splendor – you must build, and get dirty, and, yes, battle an unforgiving
nature that can bring cold, darkness and thirst in its wake.
Beware, America, of the new Californians, sirens of the affluent society who
would lure you onto our shoals.
Mr. Hanson, a fifth-generation Californian, is a grape
farmer and professor of classics. His most recent book is The Land Was
Everything (Free Press, 2000).
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