I live in Southern California. I wish I lived in Jefferson; more exactly, I wish there WAS a state of Jefferson. Bill and Scott’s recent dialogue about secession necessarily focused on California, as California exemplifies the many reasons one might consider such a move. Bill and Scott brought up a few salient points, but what they both may have missed was their propensity, along with many of us, to look at such issues from a sociological/ city planner perspective. I don’t think this is entirely wrong by any means, but I fear it could be limiting in understanding why, as in California’s case, there’s a strip of land that seems to be able to wreak havoc on the rest of the state inland of that land.
People formed towns and later cities on the need for mutual protection, services, and ready access to each other. I think the arguments about trade guilds and more literate people, over time, having opportunities to do work that wasn’t dependent on “huge tracts o’ land” made the idea of not living immediately next to one’s food source more viable. As the means of transportation improved, the ability to live in more concentrated areas, knowing the food was coming in from further away, helped up the safety and comfort quotient of living in an urban area, at least before various pollutants became issues. Over time, an interior lifestyle becoming dependent on exterior staples (i.e., food and water) seemed logical, since the concentration of peoples concentrated the decision-making power, and farmers and such were still intimately dependent on the urban markets.
Eventually, cities like San Francisco, which was the ultimate cow-town, populated primarily by those from that market that were once outside of that town and whose businesses still resided in, say, Stockton, or Sacramento (which could move goods efficiently by water), took it for granted that they were a city that was a decision-making center, supported by the countryside, which represented, for all practical purposes, nobody. The usual hegemony of the urban/urbane took root, and the resultant hubris about the city’s value, especially since the costs of creating it were going beyond its own borders, has led to the belief/practice that a city like San Francisco is indispensable, and those outside of that city owe it everything. Thus, when a city like San Francisco develops a liberal ideology to pacify its citizen, it creates a narrative that the rest of us see as the vacuous pabulum it is, but which helps justify its own existence in its eyes, and which ultimately fogs the city dwellers’ minds to seeing nothing but their own philosophy and that being applied everywhere.
At some point, the coastal cities of California, effused with their own self-importance, believe, for example, that the nice thing to do would be to un-dam (and thus damn) the Hetch-Hetchy, and let the salmon, or whatever wildlife seems to be of a romantic bent that year, be free. The idea that the cost of electricity would be prohibitive to living in that city, along with the cost of food, and maybe even the water itself, is too remote to believe. After all, each city is surrounded, even inundated, by conveniences. A false sense of self-sufficiency rules the day while the farmers are starved out, and multiple industries that support those cities die away. San Francisco, and cities like it, remains smug in its fatuous complacency.
Meanwhile, a city councilwoman, wondering why people are reluctant to pick up human feces at $184,000/yr. and live in the city, insists that those in the support structure of California shouldn’t complain. After all, if they run out of bread, they can eat cake. And if the Delta smelt needs all the water, the inland people can just grow desert crops, or take water from the Colorado, for crying out loud….