The Coast of Dystopia

I have moved from California to become a “California“. I usually say that I found a job, the truth is that I was young and in love and I followed a child. That was 21 years old, and to my surprise, I’m still here. The relationship failed, but was seduced by the romanticism of the state. I became a true believer in the dream in California, just as it began to crumble.

California has always been both an environment and a State of the Union. Other places are places Sun Others have beautiful beaches. Other places are also decent organic produce, what they say. But the California promises something more: the transformation. The State is the guardian spirit of the American frontier, the idea that a better life is possible for someone who wants it, regardless of the circumstances of his birth. You can leave your past to the border and to reinvent himself here – or as a director, an entrepreneur in high technology, a Pilates instructor, or simply someone who deserves a second chance (but certainly the same mentality that was responsible of an excess of cults, serial killers and drivers).

Nothing is more essential to have the opportunity of 1960, Golden State Master Plan for Higher Education, which ensures that residents can attend college virtually nil. The top 12.5 percent of high school graduates were headed to the University of California, among the best public institutions in the world. The top third were eligible for the State of California campus. And for someone who was “able to benefit from education, community college doors were wide open. Free! Imagine the gall, the pie-in-the-sky optimism of the plan!’s Class and race is no longer an obstacle to Mobility: this state is a model of diversity, flexibility – a true melting pot.

Now I’m married to a beneficiary of that argument. My husband, Steven, a native Angeleno, is the son of a warden and an employee of the supermarket – Japanese-Americans who were interned during the Second World War and not himself for the university. Four years for a total of about $ 4,000 (including rent and ramen) has changed his life, no guarantee of success, but have had the opportunity to do so.

Flash-forward three decades. The crisis of the state budget led to a reduction of 800 million dollars of the UC system in 2009, 500 million from $ 700 million to the CSU and community colleges. In December, the increases in rates for students of UC Regents State 32 percent. This means that once you take into account books, room and board for a year at Berkeley, the system’s flagship school, will exceed $ 30,000 this fall – the very idea of the majority of free people.

Our grandchildren are a product of this new reality. Are the working class, Asian-American-Caucasian children who grew up a block from where Steven and did not attend the same school. The oldest was accepted to a UC campus, but could not afford a higher rate or have basic needs assistance. Instead, you fight to get the classes you need to graduate from Long Beach State, where he served for five years. His sister plans to move this spring of two years, Santa Monica College (our alma mater Governator) at San Francisco State, a decision that was once automatic. Deadline for admission, but were canceled. I wonder if there will be room in the fall? See them fight, I wonder how you will do for their children. And I wonder how, if my daughter (who is 6) have a greater financial freedom than their cousins, the gap between rich and poor is not played only in the state but also within our family.

This month, Sam Green, director of documentaries who, like me, is a transplant from the Midwest to the Bay Area, will screen “Utopia in four movements” in the Sundance Film Festival. The film explores the early 20th century, faith in a future improvement of social engineering – such as the adoption of Esperanto, as a universal language that ended the war. “Overall, the joy of imagining the future is not,” said Green. “People can imagine as a continuation of the current problems. And in California, instead of having this great idea of what might be, people are trying to adopt. This is a reduction of ambitions and expectations.

Perhaps the dream of California was not realistic – in fact no longer a utopia. Utopia is greek and means “nowhere” can not incorporate its own definition. The motto of California, also Greek, does not admit any doubt that “Eureka” – “I found it!” And what is this ‘it’? “E” is what you want “is” to be, that is the beauty of “it”. “This is what we risk losing. And if we leave ‘is’ death a particular kind of American idealism died with “it”.

Governor Schwarzenegger recently called for the privatization of prisons to save the reductions in education. Potential initiatives to vote checkbox Include convening a Constitutional Convention, which – among other things, consider the two-thirds majority required for state legislators to raise taxes or pass a budget – and legal tax sales of marijuana (at the moment, at least, I would not mind if students raise rates). However, the smart money says it’s more, we must leave.

And yet we remain. Our grandchildren stay. Our cousins stay. Our brothers in the room. Our friends – sometimes with the skin of their support. Perhaps part of a dream is the only hope, faith and hard work, but also a healthy dose of denial. It ‘something that Californians, for whom natural disasters is always a blink away, are good. Why, despite the problems that afflict us, it’s always sunny here in January. Still gasping every time the camera down the hill from my house and see the extension of the bay of San Francisco suddenly opens before me. And I can still go to my garden every day of the year by a handful of Meyer lemons from my tree – and damned if I can not make lemons into lemonade.

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The Coast of Dystopia

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