{"id":9494,"date":"2009-07-25T17:26:04","date_gmt":"2009-07-25T17:26:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-07-25T17:26:04","modified_gmt":"2009-07-25T17:26:04","slug":"just-another-day-in-the-post-pat-brown-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2009\/07\/25\/just-another-day-in-the-post-pat-brown-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Another Day in the Post Pat Brown Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>I’ve been away from the internet for a few days. Precisely, I’ve been camping in one of our beautiful state parks near Mendocino. For all of our sakes, I sincerely hope that these facilities are not closed down to the public.  As I was strolling around Mendocino Village, you can’t but realize what the closures would do to the area. It would absolutely destroy the local economy, which has already been hit hard by the recession. It would compound unfortunate with stupid.<\/p>\n

At any rate, I’ve had to follow the budget debate since Thursday mostly through newspapers, and then yesterday I got some cell service to check Calitics.  Nothing too shocking, I suppose. The fact is that since Pat Brown<\/a>, this state has been slowly and steadily backsliding.  Sure, there fits of rapid movement downward, and some moments of recovery.  But since we abandoned a greater Master Plan to build California’s economy for the future, to build infrastructure and the educational foundation that we need, we’ve been heading in one direction.  A slow, inexorable trip down a road built by conservatives wearing different labels, but all focused on concentrating wealth over the fundamental good of the state.<\/p>\n

It is always disheartening to see these days of reckoning, as we face the consequences of a system gone terribly wrong.  However, it is not like we didn’t know this is coming. That we failed to plan for this day is just one more consequence of all that we have built in the rag that is our Constitution.<\/p>\n

In the coming months, years, and perhaps decades, there will be much handwringing about what we should do to bring the state on an even keel. Politicians will say something that sounds good, and we will move on, in this slow pattern downward. Unless we somehow fundamentally emerge from this pattern, I have no doubt that we will continue the trend. Either the system gets flushed, or the State does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/a>I’ve been away from the internet for a few days. Precisely, I’ve been camping in one of our beautiful state parks near Mendocino. For all of our sakes, I sincerely hope that these facilities are not closed down to the public.  As I was strolling around Mendocino Village, you can’t but realize what the closures would do to the area. It would absolutely destroy the local economy, which has already been hit hard by the recession. It would compound unfortunate with stupid.<\/p>\n

At any rate, I’ve had to follow the budget debate since Thursday mostly through newspapers, and then yesterday I got some cell service to check Calitics.  Nothing too shocking, I suppose. The fact is that since Pat Brown<\/a>, this state has been slowly and steadily backsliding.  Sure, there fits of rapid movement downward, and some moments of recovery.  But since we abandoned a greater Master Plan to build California’s economy for the future, to build infrastructure and the educational foundation that we need, we’ve been heading in one direction.  A slow, inexorable trip down a road built by conservatives wearing different labels, but all focused on concentrating wealth over the fundamental good of the state.<\/p>\n

It is always disheartening to see these days of reckoning, as we face the consequences of a system gone terribly wrong.  However, it is not like we didn’t know this is coming. That we failed to plan for this day is just one more consequence of all that we have built in the rag that is our Constitution.<\/p>\n

In the coming months, years, and perhaps decades, there will be much handwringing about what we should do to bring the state on an even keel. Politicians will say something that sounds good, and we will move on, in this slow pattern downward. Unless we somehow fundamentally emerge from this pattern, I have no doubt that we will continue the trend. Either the system gets flushed, or the State does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2t8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}