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In their passion for special and often quite obscure causes, Californians tend to ignore broader and more clamorous social issues. Though long among the nation's most ardent conservationists, they have nonetheless allowed untold pollution and desecration of their land, air, waters and wildlife. The nearly five million automobiles that churn through the Los Angeles megalopolis spew exhaust from 8,000,000 gallons of gasoline every day —thanks in large part to the inefficient smog-control devices that the cars are required to carry.
Sparkling San Diego, once proud of its clean air, now has an air-pollution problem: so has the San Francisco Bay Area and even California's plastic Holy Land, Palm Springs. On Richardson Bay at Sausalito, houseboaters regularly pollute the waters with garbage and feces. Efforts of developers to commercialize areas of Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California are only now being resisted, but the conservationists have not won that battle yet. Abalone and kelp fishermen are fast destroying their chief competitors, the sea otters —who now number only 400 along the entire California coastline. The brown pelican is virtually extinct, a victim of pesticides.
Another victim of apathy is California education. The wealthiest state in the nation ranks fourth (after New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) in the amount it spends for the education of its children, and tolerates a second-rate public school system. In addition, a political crisis threatens the nine campuses of the University of California. One of the greatest public education facilities in the land, it boasts, among other things, some of the best science faculties—including 14 Nobel laureates—of any university anywhere.
During the Reagan regime, U.C. has come under unrelenting attack. Exploiting widespread concern, the Governor has used ridicule and money power in an attempt to cow university administrators into suppressing student and faculty dissent. He recently decreed an $88 million budget cut, which may reduce future student enrollment and perhaps even force one of the campuses to close. If Reagan has his way, U.C. may also be required to change its tuition-free policy, which would further cut enrollment.
Human Laboratory
The mixture of reformist zeal and conservatism, of distrust of Government interference and insistence on Government help, are not unique to California. But it does lend California politics an especially unreal air. As visitors so often note, this sense of the unreal is everywhere: from the packaging of political candidates to the packaging of death at Forest Lawn, from Hollywood emotions to the plastic flowers and the trashcans that are disguised to look like tree trunks. These suggest the popular California metaphor: the world as euphemism. Something slightly disguised here, contrived there. And yet, and always, throughout the state there is something more. Somewhere between the cosmetics above and the San Andreas fault below, there is a kinetic energy and what can only be described as a sense of angry optimism. Earthquakes and the smog will not destroy California; perhaps the only thing that could is stasis—and no one has ever been able to say that California is standing still.