California, I Love You

Posted on August 14, 2003 in Book of Days California Watch Gray Davis Recall Social Justice

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about the careless days.

The careless days are here and now, though when I look north from the barbed wire fence separating us from our trading partner, Mexico, I see reason not to be so careless. If you look around in California, you don’t see many signs of the government collapsing under Gray Davis. The black and white still patrol the streets and even the Toll Roads. A new library opened down the hill not six months ago and they remodeled the branch where we used to go. They’re mowing the lawn in the park, keeping the booths at the state beaches manned and charging fees. If you call any state or county office, someone answers the phone.

Many of the Republican candidates for state office say that we’ve been driving business out of the state. If California is such a bane for business, I wonder, why the hell are outside business interests trying so hard to get in? Why are they dropping huge piles of money on Arnold and making it seem that he is the only candidate running against Gray Davis?

Texas and New York covet our resources and fear us as the cutting edge of the future. Many mock the state of my birth and yet they keep trying to own it. If they don’t like the way we think and the way we do things out here, why not just leave us alone?

A few reasons:

• There’s oil under this state. Lots of it. And most Californians do not want to see platforms being drilled off our coast and balls of goo washing up on our beaches. Nevertheless, they keep trying for the black gold out there. I assure you that once Schwarzenegger, a true friend of Enron’s Kenneth Lay, gets in there, the process of selling off lots will begin. And as he does, he will say it is “for the children”. Smog is also in their future if Arnold gets in.
  
• Californians are affluent. And we’ve have a track record of paying more for things than they are worth. What a great market to exploit! Let Silly Con Valley real estate prices fall and they won’t be interested.
  
• We have ports that they need to ship through to Japan. Washington and Oregon are more remote and more importantly, more environmentally conscious than your average Californian.
  
• We’re one of the largest economies in the world. We don’t need America. But America can’t afford to drop us.

It tempts me to suggest that California secede, that we allow the good old United States to fall apart as did the Soviet Union. But what about other Americans? Without us, we may see people across the land become the thralls of local warlords (former members of the Republican Party) or see them plunge into civil war. We need to hang on, I think, for the sake of the nation — for the sake of human rights across the United States which are under more threat today than they have at any other time in our history. We live now under the worst Administration in history and it’s not Gray Davis who is the problem: it is the oligarchs in Washington, the power brokers of Texas and New York. Californians need to make a stand if we wish to preserve our way of life. Gray Davis did not do this to us: the car thieves and the energy pansies like Repeat Wilson (the power behind the throne in Arnold’s drive for political superstardom) did it to us. Let’s put our feet down, tell Arnold that we see through his celluloid image, and stand our ground, here in California, against those who want to take the wealth we made for ourselves and for America.

California gold preserved the Union during the Civil War. What is needed today are California votes. Votes to prevent our legitimately elected Governor from being torn from his job simply because he lacks the snake oil luster of a one man special interest who made his money as a bodybuilder and a poster child for the New World Order’s reign of violence. Votes to say to those who are trying to undermine the great compact between us, that holds that we live with our losses in elections, that we shall continue to stand by this principle. Gray Davis is not the cause of our problems nor has he committed any crimes (which cannot be said of the man who financed the recall campaign). Less than a year into his second term, he should be allowed to finish his term, to protect the interests of the People from the real source of our problems, namely an Administration in Washington which has bankrupted the country in two short years. What we feel economically here in California is but a ripple from an asteroid that has been thrown in the lake by a Randenoid elite. Against the Washington oligarchy, we Californians must stand — for the nation, for the voters. We must say “No,” to this recall. We must look around and see that we have a good quality of life, and we must buck and we must those who would turn us into consumer thralls, utterly dependent on their oil and their toll roads and their products for our very survival.

Make this stand for freedom. Declare that you want California to be independent of carpetbaggers from other states and other nations.

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• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Aftershocks of the full moon.