Garden Grove was a great place to be as kid in the 1970s. I can remember the summer when I was 9 quite clearly. Sitting out on the driveway with my best friend and watching the fireworks every night over Disneyland, walking to Atlantis (a proto water park, still there!) via the tunnel under the Garden Grove Freeway, wandering a few blocks up Magnolia to a shopping center for a movie and ice cream, enjoying a minor earthquake at the local Sears, playing army with the neighborhood kids in the new subdivision being built around the corner where the last dairy farmer in Garden Grove sold out the year before. Endless days of perfect weather, people were friendly, it was safe for two 9-year-old kids to go on excursions by themselves.
Man, southern California was great back then. I am not sure what happened.
(This is the street today.)
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It's the SoCal story. The peace dividend of the cold war greatly reduced the federal subsidy to the aerospace industry. The soft-headed (primarily on the left) and wicked (on the right) in positions of power refused to do anything to rationally integrate (if not stem) the flood of illegal immigration. So, proposition 187 was summarily dismissed with no vestiges of its speedbumps or its message remaining. So full-speed tailspin is what the Golden state has been getting.
It has been called (jokingly and seriously) La Reconquista.
Oddly I was thinking about this the other day. We are about the same age I am guessing (I am 42) and when I was a kid my folks in the summer basically unleashed me to do whatever I wanted - be back by dinner time, have fun, gtfo. With my kids we just can't do that. Not that my neighborhood isn't good or anything, I just don't trust the general populus to do the right thing.
Incessant, it's funny you should say that. My friend's dad worked for MD in Long Beach.
Dan, my son is 12 and I let him play unsupervised now. I wouldn't in the old 'hood.
People like the Serins happened.
Government policy has lured slimeball liars & the financially illiterate to CA. People intent on living within their means have moved out.
Good news is that the Federal Government is set to stop subsidizing $750k+ mortgages:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/business/11housing.html
That could stand to come down a lot lower than $750k. Still, it's a start.
On another positive note, Minnesota politicians are proposing a constitutional amendment to define marriage being between a man & a woman. No need to rehash the debate here. But I was thrilled to hear a liberal MN Democrat deride the proposed amendment as "California-style politics".
It's one thing to say CA is a mess. State residents & grouchy right-wingers have been saying that for years. But out east, mainstream political thought still romanticizes CA politics. That's changing.
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