Dear Reader,
Fourteen ten years ago I took a road trip up a California coast with a couple old friends. That physical journey mirrored another as I got very curious above a place I call home.
California has a fascinating history that really isn’t told in school beyond the hokey missions kids build in third grade or maybe a field trip to pan for faux gold.
This place is where the future happens first, America’s coming attraction, obsessed with the young, the next big thing on the horizon.
Somewhat paradoxically that fixation on the new seems to increasingly blind us to bonafide frontiers. Instead we seem to spin in circles making the same mistakes. Boom and bust baby!
After my trip ten years ago I wrote an epic (in style) poem. With a few more adventures under my belt, I thought it’d be fun to pen another.
My sincere hope is that it offers some inspiration for another path for addressing the problems we face — or at least shredding all the gnar as you surf the interwebs today.
Cheers!
PA
Sing us the epic of California, Muse,
speak through your hills, your surf, your skies
Guide us as we take our cruise
through the mists of memory and time.
The bold words by the state capitol implore
“Bring me men to match my mountains”
No one can deny that Shasta or the Sierras soar
Challenging the worlds best to meet their might
Like Queen Califia whose amazonian warriors
wore gold while riding griffiths,
living “very near the Terrestrial Paradise”
Californians’ achievements echo into eternity
Or at least ripple across the interwebs these days
where one surfs a superhighway
And pays homage to the high prophet Steve, who gave away Jobs,
etching “designed in California” onto every magical device.
Great artists sign their work
on the boulevard of broken dreams
Sharing stories immortalized into
fifteen minutes of fame
Lured first by tall tales
of gold literally littering the streams
Unbelievable, impossible,
more far fetched than an island of amazons
As the reports kept coming in,
what felt like fiction turned into fact
Hundreds of thousands rushed to stake their claim
from across the globe
Events condensed human history
a city transformed from squalor
San Francisco grew from tents to America’s tenth largest city,
close to where it ranks today
From primitive pans to moving mountains with water machines
the obsession with gold built denim empires and fortunes from pickaxes
An intoxicating Dream
where anyone might make their pile
Boom begot boom
And millions kept coming
To stake their claim, carve a mark,
“undertake the expedition”
As the words once read in the state capitol displaying Columbus
who miscalculated the distance to Asia
and tricked the local tribes with a terrible truth
That he needed gold for his affliction of the heart
Would the First Californians bury
all the gold away
if they only knew what
Ruin that useless metal would bring?
Death, disease, oblivion for an entire way of life
The last whom simply called himself Ishi
The Yahi word for man,
Since no member of his tribe lived to introduce him
Oddly we do not celebrate such an indomitable spirit
like we do the frenzied search for a useless metal,
really rather odd when you reflect
Almost as if Columbus’ affliction was real.
Consider the first humans who actually discovered this land
those persistent pioneers who journeyed vast distances on foot
Imagine trekking across miles and miles of ice
with only a few furs and fat fueled fires to keep you warm
Perhaps as we look to the next frontiers,
not the same ole bits and bytes and devices that delight
(until they distract us into self destruction),
But the wide open whitespace ready to be explored
We might look to that itch to explore new lands
To be the first to look over the next horizon
Guided by nothing more than one’s wits and the stars
And also remember it takes a tribe to get anywhere far
Or if we insist on echoing the gold rush
Why not look to the actual Argonauts
Not those who set sailed in search of gold in 1849
But those who actually build and create and discover
Like the globe trotting heroes from ancient Greece
Todays Argonauts come from distant lands
Bring unmatched skills to bear
And beat tremendous odds to accomplish something never done before
They come from the four corners of the compass
Yet somehow many still call California West of the West
While surfers look to spot waves rippling East from Japan
Waves outrunning words from long forgotten worlds
California’s always been first a fable, a myth, a dream
then found bits and pieces in the hardscrabble soil
Yet the story has gone a bit stale,
a bit too twisted in the same loops
The Gold Rush again and again,
a boom, a bust, a boom,
The Great Exception acting the Great Adolescent,
immature and refusing to own up to its responsibility
Contrast beautiful visions of a new tomorrow: the LA River restored!
pretty pictures sitting on a shelf for decades
while San Antonio and Seoul actually fix their waterway
A sad state for a city made famous by a water engineer
In a state that set the standard for visionary public works
The world’s first tripartite system of higher education!
The State Water Project can be seen from Space!
Monuments to a bygone era of excellence
The obvious truth is, despite our best efforts, we’ve grown flabby and complacent
Our zillions of overlapping governments create impossible complexity
Just try to figure out what the local public health orders actually mean
Let alone how to figure out how to build a new home here
“Blow up the boxes!”
Shouted Schwarzenegger
Before the armies of inertia trapped the Governator like Guilliver
To get a different result, we need to think outside the box
Do we even need a department of horseless carriages
when everyone’s popping into driverless pods
And the real databases that govern our lives
have cute names that rhyme with McDougal
Yes it’s trite to compare Sacramento and Silicon Valley
and sure self driving cars are always just a few years away
yet where is the vision for what comes next
How do we actually achieve all of California’s great goals?
Global climate action now!
Environmental justice and equity for all!
A bastion of progressive values
Yet where is all the progress? When will we actually practice what we preach?
Dreams of home ownership more and more out of reach
poverty on the rise punctuated by rampant homelessness
problems piling on problems
With a new virus creating a long overdue reckoning
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May we use this long pause as an opportunity for a much needed look in the mirror
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Is not now the time for bold action?
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To venture unafraid into the new world transformed by Covid?
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To go forth and boldly build the world we wish to see
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The late, great Jeff Lustig put the matter eloquently when he said:
To take a few stabs at some pragmatic #zanyidea (™ by @vr00n )…
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Maybe, just maybe we should stop pretending that in person meetings at obscure times are the best way to engage the public
Maybe, just maybe we should not go back to pretending 30 students sitting quietly in a classroom is the one true formula for their success
This plague year has put such examples front and center
many more abound
Isn’t it time that California the great adolescent
finally grew up?
Maybe, we might remember this time around
the truth that pioneering anything new
generally requires both individual action
And a village to raise the proverbial new child
Maybe we might finally act on all those plans and proposals put forward during California’s last big bust a decade ago, only to be put back on the shelf when the boom returned.
Maybe this time we might fix the root causes of that California government so convoluted, complex and completely incomprehensible and frustrate so many common sense solutions to our problems.
[That quote is from A New California Dream, a curious little book that you should totally check out that just so happens to be by yours truly]
The state of politics today only underscores the urgency of Royce’s invocation
a philosophy Governor Brown invoked in his inaugural address
and which has only become more apropos
As more and more challenges press
Human augmentation
Clear eyed about the challenges ahead
remembering where we’ve been
and knowing it takes a tribe
We might summon the courage to burn the proverbial wagons and find another away
Perhaps we might even look beyond
this narrow patch of soil
to go forth and
Pioneer a New California in the open sea or far away amongst the stars
###
(Or maybe Elon already has a different name picked out for the first city Mars)
