Just Cart Me Off, Lord

Someone couldn't spare 10 seconds to put away the cart, center.

I can understand the fascination with end-of-the-world predictions. There's a slim chance that the terrible event will come to pass, but there are some silver linings if the horror indeed occurs: we won't have to pay off those noisome creditors, we won't have to do those urgent-but-unimportant tasks that clutter our to-do lists, and we'll take our last breath comforted by the knowledge that there is a deity after all who was mad as heck and couldn't take our foolishness any more.

Which brings me to the death of civic society. How is it that shoppers can't spend a few seconds walking their carts to the shopping cart corrals after they've loaded their car trunks? The discourteous leave them all over the parking lot, and especially on busy weekends prevent others from using valuable parking spaces.

Victor Davis Hanson laments the souring of life on the roads of central California:

I have been hit three times in the last 10 years: 1) driver ran stop sign, slammed into my truck, limped off, was run down and detained by me until police arrived; 2) speeding driver hit a mattress in the road (things such as that are rarely tied down by motorists in California), swerved, was hit, did a 180, braked, but still hit me at 45 mph head-on (survived due to the air bags of the Honda Accord); 3) rear-ended as explained above. But this time your wiser author, when the car rear-ended me at 50 mph, was driving a four-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra with huge tow bar in back; the texter was driving a Civic. Nuff said.

But wait, if you think it's bad now, it's only going to get worse.

Tens of thousands of prisoners are scheduled by a U.S. Supreme Court order to be released. But why this inability to house our criminals when we pay among the highest sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation? Too many criminals? Too few new prisons? Too high costs per prisoner? Too many non-violent crimes that warrant incarceration? God help us when they are released. We know what crime is like now; what will it be like if thousands are let go?

Wherever we turn our eyes, things are getting worse.

Our schools rate just below Mississippi in math and science. Tell me why, given our high taxes and highest paid teachers in the nation? Can the governor or legislature explain? Is the culprit the notoriously therapeutic California curriculum? The inability to fire incompetent teachers? The vast number of non-English speaking students? Derelict parents? How odd that not a single state official can offer any explanation other than: “We need more money.” What is the possible cure for the near worst math and science students in the nation? Yes, I see it now: the California Senate just passed a bill mandating the teaching of homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered history, just the sort of strategy to raise those English composition and vocabulary scores among the linguistic and arithmetic illiterate.

Try driving a California “freeway” lately, say the 101 between Gilroy and San Luis Obispo or the 99 between Modesto and Stockton, or an east-west lateral like the 152 between Casa de Fruita and Gilroy, or the 12 between Napa and Stockton [blogger's note: I've driven all those stretches in the past year, and I won't risk driving them at night]. In other words, just try driving across the state. These stretches are all nightmarish death traps (the concrete divider on the two-lane 12 is a sick joke, a sort of kill-contraption), no improvements from 40 years ago when there were 15 million fewer people and far better drivers. But how did this happen when we pay the highest gasoline taxes in the nation; where did the revenue go? Is there some cruel joke I’m missing — a stash of billions in gas tax money buried somewhere and never used? And how can we even begin discussing “high-speed rail” (stage one planned from Fresno to the megalopolis of Corcoran no less!) when millions do not yet have “high-speed roads”? Madness, sheer madness.

His despair is understandable, and I have no prescription to offer our sick state. Fellow Californians, you must hunker down and hope that times get better. Look after yourself and your family, try to do a little something for others in your spare time, and meanwhile put away that shopping cart.