Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: October 28, 2019 11:27PM
Thank you to everyone who cares.
We Californians deeply and very sincerely appreciate your concern.
To answer why we live here, despite whatever weather or the planet itself throws at us, is beyond my ability to explain with words. (I think; I will give it my best try.)
I owe my life to this state. Everyone in my close extended family (most of them are now deceased) owes/owed their life to this state.
My parents were Depression era transplants....my father came from about 1,200 miles away, and my mother from about 1,600 miles away in another direction....who came here because this was the place ("Eureka!"--means: "I have found it!," is our state motto, adopted in 1849) where they could LIVE, instead of (metaphorically) suffocate until they died.
I thank my Aunt Tomi EVERY SINGLE DAY for what she did (she, very consciously, basically sold herself into what amounted to really distasteful marital slavery, in order to get her and her close nuclear family here), because without her, my life would not have existed (in any sense).
If you want to understand California and Californians, then find a copy of "Paint Your Wagon" (set during the time of the 1850s California Gold Rush, which brought people here from ALL over the globe). (The full film is also available on You Tube for $2.99, and all of the video song clips are available for free--and what you are asking is very well conveyed in the lyrics of those songs.)
Despite all the poo-pooing of this film (it was almost universally panned by critics, and didn't do all that well during its box office run), "Paint Your Wagon" conveys EXACTLY what this state is and "always" has been about (at least since the Gold Rush which began in 1849, but probably even before for the Spaniards who came here to make this their new home)....and presents why we Californians love our state so much.
The best parts of the sitcoms and many of the films of the late twentieth century portrayed California life, as both what it actually was at that moment, and also what it had the near potential to be (centering on the promise and the in-process fulfilling of the San Fernando Valley), starting with "Rebel Without A Cause" and running through "Grease" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." (I am also going to add in "Ozzie and Harriet" here, even though the Nelson family, both on screen and in real life, lived just a handful of miles away from the Valley, through the Cahuenga Pass, in Hollywood.)
Since Spanish, and then Mexican, times California has always been the place where people could come and become who they really were inside--or who they strove to be. It is a state which lives and breathes and thrives on continual invention and reinvention: in its people, and in the creative, technological, intellectual, and scientific fields across all spectrums.
It is a place where potential is always the lowest step on the ladder--just one step away from where you are at any moment, which then leads directly, with practical effort, to the step just above.
It is as if, in 1849 and the years which followed, the U.S. part of the North America continent tipped sharply west, and the Americans and new immigrants to America who didn't fit in where they were, rolled westward to where the sun [almost always] shone, and they--as individuals and as parts of their own communities--could bloom and thrive.
Compared to California, every other place in the U.S. I've ever been to is (to me) suffocating. Once you learn another place, it usually, eventually, becomes stifling--but California always has interesting, and often newly "born," challenges available for anyone who wants to step up and take advantage of them.
Despite earthquakes and wildfires and droughts, it is "the" place we Californians actively love....and it is always changing, and growing, and intellectually evolving just enough to make sure that, year by year, we (as individuals) become the people we (as individuals) most want to be.
Thank you, Aunt Tomi.
Because of you and your great personal sacrifice, I was able to become me--my Mom and my Dad were able to become the people THEY wanted to be, and on through my entire family.
Thank you, Aunt Tomi, so very, very much.