NY Times, Aug. 26, 2020
California, We Can’t Go On Like This
Virus, heat, fire, blackouts. It’s just another summer in the nation’s
most populous state.
By Farhad Manjoo, Opinion Columnist
Across much of California in the last two weeks, many of my friends and
neighbors have faced a dead-end choice: Is it safer to conduct your life
outdoors and avoid the coronavirus, or should you rush inside, the
better to escape the choking heat, toxic smoke and raining ash?
Such has been the gagging unwinnability of life in the nation’s most
populous state in the sweltering summer of 2020, in what I have been
assured is the greatest country ever to have existed. The virus begs you
to open a window; the inferno forces you to keep it shut.
When the coronavirus first landed in America, California’s lawmakers
responded quickly and effectively, becoming a model for the rest of the
nation. But as the early wins faded and the cases spiked, each day this
summer has felt like another slide down an inevitable spiral of failure.
The virus keeps crashing into California’s many other longstanding
dysfunctions, from housing to energy to climate change to disaster
planning, and the compounding ruin is piling up like BMWs on the 405.
Consider: To keep the pestilence at bay, many of California’s children
began attending school online last week. But to satisfy surging energy
demand linked to record-shattering heat (and a host of other mysterious
reasons), state utilities had to impose rolling blackouts, forcing
schools to come up with energy contingency plans to add to their virus
contingency plans, now that millions of students face the threat of
intermittent electricity.
For decades, California has relied on conscripted prisoners as a cheap
way to fight its raging fires. But to stave off coronavirus outbreaks in
our long-overcrowded prisons, authorities released thousands of inmates
earlier this year. Now, as climate change has ushered in a new era of
“megafires” that includes some of the largest blazes the state has ever
faced, the early release of inmates has left the state dangerously short
of prisoners to exploit in battling the flames.
As California’s problems grow, we risk becoming a national piñata. At
the Democratic National Convention last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom phoned
in from Watsonville, Calif., near the scene of a wildfire, to castigate
Donald Trump and the Republican Party for ignoring climate change and
fighting California’s efforts to reduce emissions. At the Republican
convention, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a fund-raising official for the Trump
re-election campaign who is also Newsom’s ex-wife, shouted the opposite
claim — that “socialism” had turned the state into a disaster of
“discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in
homes.”
I found Guilfoyle’s speech hilariously unhinged and off base, and Newsom
certainly has a point — California’s efforts to solve its many problems,
including the virus outbreak, have often been frustrated or undone by
Trump’s shortcomings.
Still, it’s worth remembering that Trump has been president only since
2017, and the seeds of California’s undoing were planted long before. By
reducing the cause of California’s many issues to cartoon villains, both
Guilfoyle and Newsom obscured the bigger picture.
What is California’s fundamental trouble? Neither socialism nor Trumpian
neglect and incompetence, but something more elemental to life in the
Golden State: A refusal by many Californians to live sustainably and
inclusively, to give up a little bit of their own convenience for the
collective good.
This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but I’m committed to riding it until
people in my home state begin to change their ways. Californian
suburbia, the ideal of much of American suburbia, was built and sold on
the promise of endless excess — everyone gets a car, a job, a
single-family home and enough water and gasoline and electricity to
light up the party.
But it is long past obvious that infinitude was a false promise.
Traffic, sprawl, homelessness and ballooning housing costs are all
consequences of our profligacy with the land and our other resources. In
addition to a hotter, drier climate, the fires, too, are fanned by an
unsustainable way of life. Many blazes were worsened by Californians
moving into areas near forests known as the “urban-wildland interface.”
Once people move near forested land, fires tend to follow — either
because they deliberately or inadvertently ignite them, or because they
need electricity, delivered by electrical wires that can cause sparks
that turn into conflagrations.
As the fires blazed around us this time last year, I warned of the “end
of California as we know it” — that if we didn’t begin to radically
alter how we live, the climate and the high cost of living would make
the state uninhabitable for large numbers of people.
Of course, California hasn’t yet ended. Through virus and flame, the
state has kept lurching along in the same haphazard way it always has,
and here we are again to face another burning season.
It is my hope, though, that with each year we burn, each new wildfire
year that we live through, Californians start to recognize the mistakes
that are central to our way of life.
And perhaps, this year, the disturbing national political conversation
might finally force my fellow Californians to reckon with how they live.
In many ways the 2020 election is shaping up to be a fight over the soul
of the suburbs — their role in America’s future, and who they are for.
At the Republican convention this week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the
couple who brandished guns at protesters in St. Louis, asserted that
liberals want to “abolish the suburbs” by ending single-family home
zoning. The liberals who live in California’s suburbs may not identify
with the McCloskeys, but their ugly spectacle has helped unmask
NIMBYism, one of California’s most reckless ideologies, for the racist
vision it has long been.
It just isn’t true that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish the
suburbs, or even improve them, which is a shame. Neither Biden nor his
party nor just about anyone else in national or state politics has been
willing to honestly discuss the incalculable damage that
California-style suburban life has wreaked on our world. In California,
if anything is going to ruin the suburbs, it is more likely to be a
wildfire than a new president.
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