California. Boy I don't know.
I have decided that California is neither a blue state, nor a red state, nor the mottled blue and red state I used to picture when I thought of it’s political leanings. No, in reality, California is so confused politically that we are one giant ugly-shade-of-purple state* where the red and the blue blend together so badly, that we can’t decide what we want and when we all get together to vote, we do so schizophrenically, frequently shooting ourselves in the collective foot with contradictory decisions.
Consider last night’s election. As a state, in my opinion, we did well in the presidential category. We helped elect Barack Obama, our nation’s first president of color and, much more importantly, I feel the better man for the job as it stands right now. But we usually manage to get it together for federal office and manage to vote for the candidate who is best for the collective us.
When you get to the state level issues, it’s a far different matter. We went scary religious right conservative and voted to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. (The fact that I am absolutely sick about this is not the point of this particular post.**) And while we were banning basic human rights for a specific group of people, we went all the way to the left and voted for prop 2 to protect the rights of chickens and farm animals. WTF?
But we like children. So we voted for the children’s hospital measure. And we want parents to have complete control over every little thing about their child’s environment for fear that they might learn people are different so as mentioned before we voted for prop 8…but we voted against prop 4 because mommy and daddy need to know if their child might learn that gay people want to get married, but not if their child is going to have an abortion. Because that makes sense. Right?
We voted for 9, the victim’s rights proposition, one of the end results of which is likely to be criminals staying in prison longer. But at the same time, we voted against 6 which would have given more money to the prison system (and the sheriffs and police) and against 5 which would have kept non-violent drug offenders out of the prisons. I make no judgments on the merits of these individual propositions. In fact I voted no on all three because as a state, good idea or bad, we simply don’t have the money right now and I will get to that in a minute. I merely point out the inherent contradiction of the setting ourselves up for disaster variety in this particular combination of yeses and nos.
For the last two years we have griped even more than usually about our state government representatives. As a state we were so upset over our leadership that yesterday we voted for prop 11, demanding redistricting so that we can supposedly more reliably elect people who truly represent us. But at the same time, in every single state assembly and state senate contest where an incumbent was running for re-election, we elected the incumbent. We did the same thing in the races for U.S. Congress by the way. Now, some might say that this in and of itself is an argument for the need to redistrict. However I am of the opinion that if we were honestly peeved enough about the situation to pass prop 11, surely there were enough people in specific districts sufficiently annoyed with the status quo to upset at least one or two of those incumbents. Nope. This is just another instance of ineffectively purple California. If we had either voted for prop 11 or re-elected all of the incumbents either might have been good or bad for us. But both together isn’t going to accomplish a whole heck of a lot.
So, about our state finances. We know they’re in bad shape. We know about the recession. That was a large part of the reason for voting for prop11 - getting rid of folks who spend our money frivolously, can’t pass a budget, and legislate businesses out of California…Except then every proposition we passed either calls outright for spending large sums of money we don’t’ have or will be very expensive due to the legal and administrative costs and/or consequences. And, we voted to legislate chicken farming right out of California because what are those chicken farmers going to do? Pay more to do business here, or start doing business more economically in another state just like so many industries before them? Good job, California!
And then, after all of this, as a state we will probably continue to gripe about how our legislators don’t represent our wishes. Well, gee. I wonder why? I mean, we’ve given them such a clear picture of what we value, want and need…oh.
*Yes, as a matter of fact ugly-shade-of-purple is a real color. Yup. *nods believably* It will be in the next edition of the Crayola big box of crayons right next to the Macaroni and Cheese. Seriously. It’s the new beige. It’ll be a thing.
** Though hope is still alive. It looks like the ACLU is taking it all the way to the Supreme Court which could make gay marriage legal across the board, not just in California…I hope, I hope, I hope!