Wild About Wildflowers

Right about now it is high season for blooming wildflowers in the two states that I have lived in, California and Texas. When I see the Bluebonnets come out in Texas, it makes me nostalgic for the days that I used to pack up my family and we'd day trip it to Gorman California where the Golden Poppies (state flower) and the lupins would be blooming in madly splashed mosaic patterns of violet and orange all over the hillsides.

Bluebonnets remind me of stunted lupins and I'm sure that they are botanically related. I'm a little biased, so you be the judge. Which do you think is the better scene?

The Golden Poppy/Lupin menage?

Or this scene from monospecific Bluebonnet field?

California GOP Hearts Ron Paul

So I guess I might have mentioned before that I am a California native living as an expatriate here in southeast Texas. I may have also mentioned my admiration for Californians as being mostly Democratic, and they even have a hefty number of progressives out there.

But it is now obvious to me that just as California’s left tack a little further left through their progressive component; it also seems that California’s right tack a little further right through their Libertarian component. The John Birch Society, after all, has its roots in deep red Orange County.

Obvious to me because of this new California GOP straw poll (they are meeting in a statewide convention in LA this weekend) that has Dr. Ron Paul far in the lead of those who they want to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

No, really. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. Paul garnered 44.9% of all votes cast in the straw poll compared to Rick Perry’s 29.3%. Darn near two to one. And why is this such welcome news? California, the country’s most populous state, has the most convention delegates, by far than any other state. What would have made this sweeter is that California used to be a “winner take all” state in the Republican Party. But it is still pretty sweet that Ron Paul arrives at next year’s GOP convention with a near-majority of California delegates in his pocket.

And don’t believe I want Paul to win the nomination, Perry would be a far more entertaining candidate in an intellectual debate with my President. If Paul got the nomination it will ruin the fun because he actually speaks very well. He’s a smart guy.

Smart, yes. But as cracked as the Liberty Bell.

He’ll Be Back

Not that I have been keeping tabs, and not that I really care one way or another, but today I noticed that the former governor of California, the former Republican governor of California, that is, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is going to go back to making movies.

No, really.

He tweeted it.

Snow . . . Sierras . . . Spectacular

I've been remiss in making postings every day and now I can explain why. I've been traveling and not being a creature of mobile technology I don't do postings very well unless I have a dinosaur desktop in front of me. A couple of days ago it was a desktop that kept eating minutes off my MasterCard.

I need to get a laptop.

Anyway today I made it back to my most favorite place on the surface of the earth, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and specifically to a little glacier-cut cleft in it called Yosemite Valley.

It has been raining in California for days upon endless day, most recently on Christmas Day in most of the state. So that translates to SNOW above 4000 feet above msl.

And this was a first for me. Snow in Yosemite.

Here is where we had to pull over and put on the snow chains. Snow chains aren't actually chains anymore. They are wire cables with steel cylinders ingeniously held on the tire with a little keyhole thing.

Here are my companions in a winter wonderland.

Yosemite Valley is just about the most striking geomorphic feature I have ever seen. Sheer glacier-cut granite cliffs border a valley floor carpeted in meadows and forests.

Neat, huh?

Half Dome is that granite dome you see off in the distance. Here it is a little closer.

I've been up to the top of Half Dome twice in my life. Hopefully there is another trip up there left in me.

Finally, just before losing the light we visited my old friend Yosemite Falls. It was fairly full. Not as you see it in the spring, but compared to when you usually see it in summer, it was a torrent. And a loud one at that.

"I must return to the mountains—to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there."

John Muir in a Letter to Mrs. Ezra Carr (November 15, 1869)

California: Messing With Texas

Now today, in my effort to find out what the Texas State Board of Education is doing, and whether the board is going to adopt the Teabagger Version of US history, I ran across an article that reestablished my admiration for all things Californian, the state of my origin.

First, what I found out about the happening in Austin, is that it looks like Thomas Jefferson has been re-recognized as a major contributor to the philosophies of the Founding Fathers, good news, and that the “Atlantic Triangle Trade”, a euphemism for Slave Trade, has been excised.

No word on whether we are going to teach that Hispanics fought against the Mexican Army at the Alamo, or whether Joe McCarthy wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

But the article that caught my eye was a report that the California State Senate is considering SB 1415, an act to emend the state’s Education Code. It’s so deliciously perfect all by itself that I will just post below a paragraph from an analysis of the bill as found here.

“This bill requires the State Board of Education (SBE) to (1) notify the Legislature and Governors office if it determines any instructional materials submitted for consideration for adoption contain content that meets the revised standards for social studies curriculum in Texas, and (2) to ensure that the next revision of the History-Social Science framework is consistent with existing requirements to ensure instructional materials include, portray accurately, encourage and impress certain content upon pupils”

Isn’t that just great? California, the largest purchaser of textbooks in the United States wants to make sure that ideologues on the Texas state school board don’t get to dictate content in books sold to California. Texas is the nation’s second-largest purchaser of school textbooks.

The bill specifically mentions Texas, and only Texas.

Messing with Texas, California-style.

Governator Shuts Down Drilling In State Waters

Now take California. Please.

No, just kidding. California, the state of my origin has just done the right thing, again, through its Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger took one look at the looming ecological disaster that BP and its henchmen have inflicted on the Gulf Coast, an area that has been generally benign toward offshore oil development, and passed on a 2008 agreement to develop oil deposits that occur in state waters by drilling horizontal wells from existing rigs that are currently sitting in federal waters.

Proposed by a Texas oil consortium that calls itself Plains Exploration and Production Co., or PXP, the project would have brought much-needed oil revenue to California, to the tune of $100 million per year.

A nice chunk of change for a state which is reeling under an $18 billion budget deficit.

But the governator is opting out and is closing exploration and development drilling in California state waters (which extend from the beach to 3 miles offshore) “for the foreseeable future.”

From AP through the Houston Chronicle:

“You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, 'Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?' Schwarzenegger said.”

Indeed.

Back in 1969 California experienced the first significant offshore oil disaster in the now historic Santa Barbara Channel blowout. The blowout polluted the beaches of some very high priced real estate and brought on a federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling that lasted for some years.

Tony Strrickland, a GOP California state senator and PXP-supporter complains that the present disaster in the Gulf in no way, shape or form resembles the Santa Barbara oil spill.

“‘They are two completely different types of drilling. In the Gulf they had to use floating platforms because of deep waters. T-ridge is only 1,000 feet deep and the platforms would be fixed,’ Strickland said. ‘If we don't drill oil here, then we have to import it from overseas, which also has a big risk of oil spills’”

I love that last argument. If we don’t drill for it we’ll have to tanker it in.

This is a nice argument that might even make some sense, except that our unquenchable thirst for crude oil, our vast demand for the stuff, requires that we import oil from the Middle East whether we drill for it here or not.

But the reality is this: the present BP disaster resembles what happened 41 years ago in Santa Barbara more than anyone is willing to admit.

The Santa Barbara blowout occurred on a platform set in 188 feet of water, set into the seabed. That makes it dissimilar because the Deepwater Horizon was a floater. However, that is where the dissimilarity ends. In 1969 they were drilling well A-21 off Platform A in the Dos Cuadras Field, operated by Union Oil Company. For reasons that became apparent later, surface casing was set too shallow. When the drillers were pulling the drill string out of the hole the well was “swabbed” – sort of what you do with a plumber’s friend in your kitchen sink, but in the opposite direction.

Oil came up to the drill floor and the BOP was immediately closed. Oil stopped flowing. But what happened next, because the surface casing was set to shallow, the high pressure oil fractured the surrounding shallow sediments, and oil flowed up these fractures to the sea floor.

Just about exactly what is happening in the BP well, from the reports I hear. Oil is not just flowing through the BOP which never closed off completely, but also from the seabed.

To this day tentlike structures on the seafloor around Platform A collect the slowly seeping petroleum from these seeps – much like the dome that BP is proposing to build and deploy.

So, beg to differ, this thing in the Gulf looks a lot like the blowout event in the Santa Barbara Channel.

But the whole irony of the article we read in the Houston Chronicle is from contributions from the local commenters. The gist of their argument is that if California won’t drill for oil in their state offshore acreage, they should not get a drop of oil from Texas – or Louisiana.

Sometimes I have to shake my head in disbelief at the incredible ignorance of my fellow Texans on the right.

California imports no oil from the Gulf Coast.

As a matter of fact, and I remember this well, the irony of it that is, in 1986 the Pacific Texas Pipeline Company laid a thousand mile-long oil pipeline from California to Texas. Not to get oil to California from Texas, but the other way around. To send oil produced from California and Alaska oil fields to Texas refineries.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Signs Harvey Milk Bill

I didn’t even hear about this on the news this week. Earlier this week, on October 13 to be exact, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Harvey Milk Bill into law. The bill designates May 22nd, the former San Francisco City Supervisor’s birthday, as Harvey Milk Day.

Harvey Milk, it may be recalled was one of the first openly gay persons to be elected to public office in America. We now have a few more, with the promise of more to come in the future, but Milk was one of the first, and tragically became the first openly gay office holder to be murdered, ostensibly because he was gay.

Harvey Milk became the first office holder, but obviously not the first person, to suffer from what Barack Obama has called the last legal discrimination policy in America. Milk was a victim of the ultimate in this kind of discrimination when he received 5 bullets fired into him by a former rival on the Board of Supervisors, a truly disturbed man named Dan White.

Dan White, a double murderer (he also killed San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone), was sentenced to 7 years and 8 months behind bars for this offense, having been found guilty of voluntary manslaughter by a mostly anti-gay conservative jury. White’s defense lawyer mounted what is still considered to be one of the most outrageous criminal defenses in human history, a defense that completely dismissed White's heinous crime – arguably because one of his victims was gay, and probably needed killing.

It was called the “Twinkie Defense.” The jury, which probably would have bought any old argument, was told that Dan White was not really responsible for the killing of those two men because he was chronically depressed, the evidence of which was that he ate copious amounts of junk food.

It was a black day in California history with gays rioting and attacking police, and vice versa. A day made blacker when Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the Harvey Milk Bill when it arrived at his desk last year. It took a year, President Obama’s posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Milk, and an Academy Award-winning film on the life of Harvey Milk, to change Schwarzenegger’s mind.

The bill was opposed by The Campaign for Children and Families, calling it "the strongest impetus yet for loving parents to remove their children from anti-family public schools."

Wow. There is yet another great reason for teaching in public schools in California.

Parents like that self-select and remove their children from publicly funded schools.

How great is that?

Day 5: Meadows, Meadows and More Meadows

On Day 5 of my California pilgrimage I beat the heat by ascending to 6500 feet above msl to the forests and meadows of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A mountain chain that wends its way through eastern California before coming to a brutal end at the Tehachapi Fault where it is translated westward and eventually becomes re-established as the Peninsular Range of Southern California.

I took a short hike around Crescent Meadow. Around it because this is a meadow where no human shoe is allowed to tread.

Here is a longitudinal shot of the western crescent cusp, taken thankfully from a cool shady spot.

Here it is again in case you doubt the veracity of my words.

My hiking partner playing hide and seek behind one of the largest sequoia trees I have ever seen that doesn’t have a Civil War general’s name attached to it.

Look up.

Arriving at the destination: Tharp’s Log. Hale Tharp was a rancher that moved his cattle up from the foothills every year between 1858 and 1890. He let his cattle feed on the grasses of Crescent Meadow while he inhabited a hollow log that he fixed up inside and out. Note the chimney.
Inside, the log is bedecked with a table, a shelf and a bed platform.


And this is a sight similar to what Tharp saw every day as he emerged from his log hut.


But in 1890 the area was declared, thankfully, a national park. They didn’t want the logging companies to come in and cut down the massive Sequoia sempervirens trees, after all.

Then when they did try to cut a few down in the 1920’s they found to their chagrin that Sequoia wood, while massive and would make many, many board-feet of lumber, made for poor building material.

In all, a curious confluence of capitalism and conservation.

Water, Water Nowhere

So I haven’t been posting anything on the blog lately, you may have noticed. I decided that I had had enough hot dry weather in Southeast Texas so I got myself on a plane and headed back to Paradise on Earth. The state of my origin. California.

Only to find that they also are experiencing hot, dry weather.

El Niño is firmly in place and that drives the weather pattern to the north.

Here, they are worried that they will have a warm winter so that while it will rain in the north, it won’t snow. And they rely on their snowpack for their water supply.

Preparations are afoot, then, for water rationing.

I visited a newlywed couple that I know here last weekend and saw that they had already done some preparations for a dry spell. They ripped out their water-loving grass and planted xeriscape.

No, the kids can’t play on it and the dog can’t poop on it, but since they have no kids but own two cats, problem solved.

When I get to a place where I can upload a photo you'll be able to see what they're doing to save water in California.

UPDATE: Here it is.

On Taxing Texans, Tuition, and Fun in the Sunshine State

You have to laugh at the deep chasm that exists between the financial policies of the governor of my home state, California, and the governor of the state that continues its grip on my presence, Texas.

Today, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued his State of the State message to the state legislature, and reversed himself in two key finance areas: taxes and tuition.

Now get this, in 2003 the governor, in foreseeing a budgetary shortfall, urged the newly Republican-dominated legislature to de-regulate college tuition, saying that it would make colleges compete for FTEs (Full Time Equivalents) and drive down college tuition.

And then the opposite happened, and Texas state college tuition went through the roof, causing thousands to have to pull in their belts to afford these crushing fees, or to give up on higher education altogether.

And now, with an almost certain primary challenge by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison coming at him in 2010, who polls in the neighborhood of 60% in Texas as opposed to the governor’s 39%, Perry completely reversed himself and urged the legislature to freeze tuition costs for four years, so that incoming freshmen pay the same rate of tuition every year for four years.

Nice job.

And then there’s the business tax.

Over the howls of conservatives and business leaders, Rick Perry found a way to balance the state budget by instituting a tax on business.

One thing you don’t want to do to Texas conservatives is take away their guns. The other is to raise their taxes.

Businessmen across the state screamed bloody murder and vowed not to let him return to office in 2006, splitting their vote between a former Democrat and a comedian.

So to mollify the very people who voted for Kinky and Grandma in 2006 as a result of this tax, Perry is proposing to increase the gross receipts threshold that small businesses use to get a tax exemption from the state.

A complete reversal. Rick Perry remade himself today.

Contrast that to how California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes to raise revenue for his state’s budget crisis.

He wants to tax fun.

Interesting that California’s number one industry is the entertainment industry, and Schwarzenegger wants to tax it.

Taxes on admission tickets to Disneyland and any old amusement park that applies.

Taxes on a round of golf.

Taxes on concerts.

Taxes on baseball games.

And for some strange reason, he wants to tax fixing things.

Taxes on auto repairs.

Taxes on repairing your washing machine (this ought to boost the sales of Maytags, by the way).

Taxes on shoe repairs.

And he wants to tax Californian hair and fingernails.

That last one is diabolical. With the exception of some of us, hair and fingernail growth is incessant, making a tax on your haircuts and manicures not only unavoidable, but also unremitting.

And here is proof-positive that the Governator has no intention of going back to making blockbuster movies when his term-limited time in office ends.

He wants to tax movie tickets.

Ike Sucks

Actually, you know . . . technically . . . Ike blows. But I am adopting the terminology found in a new blog I discovered the other day: Anything But Nice. I ran across it the other day when I was checking out the newest links to this web page. I was actually dumbstruck to see that the blogger, Colleen, has a link to this web page associated with the words “Texas & Politics.”

OK, well I suppose if Pete Olson can call me a “prominent local Democrat blogger,” Colleen can do what she wants. I can, too. Notice I have a link to her blog in my “Faves” blogroll now.

But I digress.

Ike really sucks. I came out of the storm relatively unscathed compared to others. My backyard fence blew down and that was no surprise, it was 15 years old and coming apart anyway. I lost power at 8:30 but it was restored a mere 22 hours later. TV and internet were out for 5 days and it was fun to see the neighborhood kids outside playing and families going for walks.

It brought back memories of my childhood.

But during my childhood, the wind didn’t knock over fences, trees, houses and trailers. The rain fell vertically.

Sometimes the ground moved up and down and side to side but that’s life on the faultline. People here tell me that they’d take a hurricane over an earthquake any day.

I beg to differ.

You see, when there’s an earthquake there is no warning. There is no one on the news with “cones of uncertainty” showing where the earthquake is likely to hit.

For five straight days.

And in most earthquakes the devastation is localized to the epicenter and maybe a few square miles around it. A hurricane is an earthquake with legs.

An earthquake will knock things over. A hurricane will wipe things off the map.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at two photographs that inspired this piece. The first photo is the “before” shot of a part of the Bolivar Peninsula.

This next photo is the “after” shot of just about the exact same area.

Some of those houses simply aren’t there anymore. There isn’t even any debris, just bare earth.

I don’t know for sure, but I assume that the Bolivar Peninsula was named in honor of the South American Revolutionary Simόn Bolívar. Bolivar is one of those place names that Texans love to mispronounce. Where I grew up Bolivar was pronounced bo-LEE-var, with a stress on the second syllable. Here in Texas it’s pronounced BAWL-eh-ver.

But I suppose there is some good to the place name mispronunciations that you run across all the time here.

Like how Texans pronounce the name “Fuqua” as opposed to how Californians would.

Californians would never name a place “Fuqua.”

Where Milk and Honey Flows . . .

In California, they have Hollywood.

They have Disneyland and Universal Studios (the part that didn’t burn).

They have the Sierra Nevada and Big Sur (the part that isn’t burning).

They have the Golden Gate, and the bridge that spans it.

They have all of that, and much, much more.

Including the highest gasoline prices that I have ever witnessed.

Don’t be alarmed, I didn’t pay this price. I had to buy it for a dime more a gallon later on that day because they had the cheapest price between Wasco and Shafter.

Don’t get me started on those names.

FEMA Orwellian News Conference: Flash In the Pan or Futurespeak?

FEMA’s Deputy Administrator, Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson needed to hold a news conference today over FEMA’s reaction to the wildfire and refugee situation in California, and he needed it fast.

So fast that, when it came time to call up the newspapers and news services, well, they skipped that step. Time’s a-wasting after all, and they have to move, move, move.

So he invited his staffers to the “news conference” to pose as journalists and they threw nerf balls at him in terms of questions.

“Are you happy with FEMA’s performance in the California fire fight,” asked a questioner named Mike. Harvey replied “Yes, I am very happy”.

You could even see the look of consternation on ol’ Harvey’s face and practically read his thoughts: “Holy heck, Mike, ask something a little tougher, don’t make this too obvious”.

Another questioner asked this:

“Sir, we understand the secretary and the administrator of FEMA are on their way out there. What is their objective? And is there anyone else traveling with them?”

This is a disturbing turn of events. Disturbing because some people in our federal government thought that this was actually a good idea, and also thought that they would be able to get away with it. Someone who maybe has the Holy Bible and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 on their bedstead.

One of the slogans of “The Party” in Orwell’s book went like this:

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Having your own shills asking you questions at a staged press conference appears to be all about controlling the present. Something FEMA has never been able to master since coming under the leadership of the Bush regime. This blatant attempt at controlling the media by becoming the media.

My hope is that this was a rogue event that won’t become the norm. I am characteristically pessimistic, though, and expect more to come. Why? Think about the other party slogans. Any of them sound familiar?

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

California Is On Fire

I think I have mentioned before that I am not from around here. I am a California transplant. People sometimes ask me since I once lived in /California what am I doing here in Texas?

My stock answer: That’s a question that I often ask myself.

Truth is, it’s not all that bad here in the Texas Gulf Coastal plain. The weather sucks about 3/4ths of the time, though. People tell me, but have you looked outside today? There’s gorgeous weather outside today.

My stock answer: It’s like this 300 days a year in California.

But not these days. The past couple of days Texas has had it over California weather wise.

It’s this way every year at this time. They’re called the Santa Ana winds, and the weather pattern is called a Santa Ana condition.

No one really knows where the name came from. Santa Ana is a bedroom community in Southern California but there is nothing special about winds there. The website I found on the subject, here, suggests it comes from Santa Ana Canyon, one of the San Gabriel Mountain canyons that funnel these winds into LA. And there may be some truth to that, but there is also a school of thought that the actual name is Santana.

What happens is that a high pressure area forms in the California eastern desert and this produces a pressure gradient that sends winds through narrow canyons in the central and coastal mountain ranges. Friction heats up the wind as it finds itself trying to get through smaller and smaller pathways, and wind velocity builds for the same reason. The result is hot dry winds that turn everything in sight into tinder.

And all that needs to happen is a spark. Quite often the spark is from a cigarette. Sometimes fires are intentionally set by crazies. What typically happens is several fires break out naturally, then several more fires are set intentinally. The result is a fiery maelstrom. Separate fires have been known to join to make one big fire.

For most California residents, the fires that are fanned by the Santa Ana winds are mere inconveniences. But if you have a house in the foothills, the chances are high that you will be directly affected. And this, by the way, is one paradox that always sets some people on edge: if you lose your home in a fire, say a home in the hills above Malibu, and the Governor declares a disaster area (as he did), you qualify for low interest loans to rebuild your house. A paradox because if you have a house in the hills of Malibu you are already as rich as Croesus.

But the fire disaster is only the beginning. Say your house was saved by fire fighters from destruction. Now you have the long winter to look forward to. When fires strip the brush off the hillsides (brush commonly called chaparral), and it starts to rain, the soil has no plants to serve as anchors, and you get horrendous mudslides that bowl houses over and cover their sleeping inhabitants. Roadways disappear.

All this sounds pretty bad. Why would anyone want to live in California?

Why? Because in California, it’s like it was today here in the Texas Gulf Coastal plain 300 days a year.

In case you haven’t been following this, here are a couple of You Tube videos.



This is one of a TV reporter covering the destruction of his own home. This is a first.



And last but not least, here is a satellite photo from NASA.

Memories of Dr. King on the Eve of His Birthday

Clicking through my blogroll this morning, I noticed that Texas State Rep. Aaron Pena had an interesting link to an audio file (in two parts) of a speech given by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Temple Israel congregation in Hollywood, California on Feb. 26, 1965.

I listened to it in its entirety. I had never heard it before and noted common threads and themes to his earlier and later speeches. I was particularly drawn to his remarks in regard to a trip to India that he made with his wife, Coretta Scott King. At one meeting he attended there, he was introduced as a “fellow Untouchable”. He said he at first took offense to the label, then thought about it and decided that, indeed, the shoe fit.

Here are his words:

“I remember some time ago, Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India and we had some marvelous experiences. They will remain dear to me as long as the chords of memory shall lengthen.”

“I remember one afternoon that we journeyed down to the southernmost part of India in the state of Kerala. And I was to address that afternoon, some high school students who were the children mainly of parents who had been Untouchables. And I remember that afternoon that the principal went through his introduction, and when he came to the end he said ‘I am happy to present to you students a fellow Untouchable from the United States of America’”.

"And for the moment I was peeved and shocked that he would introduce me as an Untouchable. But pretty soon my mind leaped the Atlantic. And I started thinking about conditions back home."

“And I started thinking about the fact that I could not go into most places of public accommodation all across the South. I started thinking about the fact that twenty million of my black brothers and sisters were still at the bottom of the economic ladder. I started thinking about the fact [that] Negroes all over America, even if they have the money, cannot buy homes and rent homes of their choices because so many of their white brothers don’t want to live near them.”

“I started thinking about the fact that my little children were still judged in terms of the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. And I said to myself I AM an Untouchable, and every Negro in the United States is an Untouchable. And segregation is evil because it stigmatizes the segregated as an Untouchable in a caste system. We’ve been in the mountain of segregation long enough. And it is time for all men of good will to say now, we’re through with segregation now, henceforth, and forever more.”

The man could turn a phrase.

My personal recollections of Dr. King were those of a young boy growing up in suburban Southern California. There were no black kids in my school. I lived in one of those neighborhoods that Dr. King described. Indeed, a ballot proposition was passed in the early 60’s in California, called the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which was an attempt to “to help end racial discrimination by property owners and landlords who refused to rent or sell their property to ‘colored’ customers.” Three years later it was overturned by the California State Supreme Court. I recall the righteous indignation over that ballot initiative on the part of my parents who, were by that time, landlords, and their relief when it was overturned.

Yeah, you thought that Californians were all a bunch of lefty nutcases, didn’t you?

I also recall the backyard celebration that was held by my father and his brother the day that Dr. King was assassinated. I never did understand their delight at the death of a minister who was, to my young mind, a sincere man.

In all fairness, my father, who still lives and breathes, has since made a complete 180 and is now rabidly liberal. It’s actually no fun talking to him anymore because we agree on everything. For the record, I won the last argument I had with him, and my dad stopped voting a straight Green ticket and votes Democratic again.