California Dreamin’: Once A Paradise, To Many Now A Nightmare

To think that once I wanted to live in California. That was in 1970. The allure of sun, surf and sand was a draw card for many. San Francisco was considered the most beautiful city in America. You could actually walk down the street without having to sidestep human feces.

Famous actor, David Niven wrote Bring On the Empty Horses in 1975, a collection of highly entertaining reminiscences from Hollywood and Los Angeles in general, in the 1940s. This was the golden age of Hollywood.

San Jose—before ‘Silicon Valley’—boasted nice inexpensive homes. I looked into moving there from the frigid Canadian climate however, immigrating to the U.S. legally was near impossible. In hindsight it was a good thing. I ended up in Perth, Western Australia, the “California” of down under without the negative characteristics causing many to leave the U.S. state today.

Columnist, Patrice Lewis of World News Daily offers her reasons for leaving California in her article, Why haven’t you left California

Here are some highlights:

• The state is notoriously hostile to business, with a regulatory climate that can only be called punitive (how dare you try to start a business!).

• Homelessness has reached crisis levels, and the issue appears unsolvable.

• The state has become a taxpayer-funded abortion "sanctuary," which encourages abortion "tourism."

• The state is also positioning itself to become a transgender "sanctuary" where minor children can have their genitals amputated without parental consent.

• If AB 665 becomes law, parents may soon effectively lose custody of kids 12 and over.

• Theft has been decriminalized, with the expected spike in crime. Stores in urban areas are closing in droves because they can't turn a profit or protect their employees.

• Housing prices are astronomical (Jarrett Stepman explains how liberal housing policies has made San Francisco unaffordable for all but the rich, and one in five Californians pay more than 50% of their income for housing).

• The public education system is an absolute joke.

• It's crowded. There are more people living in California than in the whole of Canada.

• Mismanagement (not "climate change") has resulted on uncontrollable and tragic wildfires. My childhood neighborhood was incinerated several years ago.

• The electrical grid totters on third-world status. In fact, California's grid faces collapse as even as leaders push aggressive measures to transition to renewable energy sources and start mandating electric vehicles.

We can only remember what it once was, circa 1965, before politicians took the state on a downward spiral.