Is Concrete Our Only Common Ground? : We show little inclination to rescue the many Californians trapped in the collapse of our social network.

Rumors of the death of the California tax revolt are greatly exaggerated. Skepticism about government still runs so deep that it virtually took an act of God, the Loma Prieta earthquake, to pass Proposition 111. The $18.5-billion measure on the June primary ballot promised to “make our freeways, bridges and streets EARTHQUAKE SAFE.”

The crucial transportation package raises hopes for shoring up our physical infrastructure. But it also provokes perplexing questions about priorities for our human infrastructure, as Californians begin to choose a new governor and a new agenda for the 1990s.

Are our freeways the only place where Californians meet on common ground and agree to reinforce the system for the benefit of all? Is our social infrastructure--our system of schools, child-welfare programs, hospitals, homeless shelters and mental-health facilities--less important for our survival and common good? If we can trust politicians and bureaucrats with billions of dollars to fix the freeway mess, why can’t we bring ourselves to insist that they straighten out the welfare, health-care, education and judicial tangles?

The politicians are lagging behind public opinion. In a Times Poll last week, three-quarters of the respondents said they would pay higher taxes for specific purposes, such as education.

During the last decade, we’ve seen state and county governments fail, either through inertia or incompetence, to meet even such basic responsibilities as ensuring that all children are immunized. Most of our public institutions have become identified with some very un-California labels: Schools speak of failure, welfare offices of despair, clinics of helplessness, courts of railroaded justice. Only the prisons speak of growth--a sure sign of decline.

Why does the state that gave birth to the human potential movement have so little esteem for its public institutions?

It’s facile to say that engineering problems, such as quake-shaky overpasses, lend themselves to concrete solutions, while social problems are not resolved by social engineering.

The tools are at our disposal; we have only to decide to use them.

The alienation of Californians from one another’s concerns is a byproduct of the freeway culture. Mobility made flight from reality possible. Even before our urban freeways were walled off, what did we see in the blur of 65 m.p.h.? Familiarity with other neighborhoods, much less a sense of connection to the people living in them, got broken, run over, cast aside as one community after the other got paved over.

That all changed when traffic stopped flowing. Stalled in mile-long parking lots, spewing exhaust in each other’s faces, motorists could no longer avoid the devastation that out-of-control growth had wreaked on the land: a horizon dotted with factories, mini-malls, crumbling apartment blocks and, everywhere, the graffiti of despair. Poverty under the palms. The political solution was more growth, and more freeways to serve it. A new transportation network is sorely needed. But can we afford to build new roads to dying neighborhoods? New overpasses above derelict schools? New interchanges to nowhere?

As we focus on the freeway system, Californians have trouble visualizing our social system. Unsafe roads are concrete dangers that are easy to picture: Who can forget the vivid televised scenes of rescue crews pulling people from the rubble of the collapsed Nimitz Freeway? But who will rescue the many thousands of Californians trapped in the collapse of our social network? Countless children are suffering in abusive homes or shuffled around among uncaring institutions. Are we inured to their misery? Are we blind to old people, abandoned like trash by the freeway? Is pain less real, endangerment less painful, because it happens out of sight? The most endangered Californians are just beginning life. Four thousand “crack babies” are expected to be born in Los Angeles County alone this year; the first “crack generation” is now entering kindergarten. Their little fingers clutch at a widening fissure in society that divides rich and poor Californians: a human San Andreas Fault. Fault lines of stressed government bureaucracies radiate out from Sacramento to cities and rural communities short of funds for basic services. From overwhelmed courts and prisons to under-funded health clinics and schools, California’s gridlocked government is unsafe at any speed. We have become a rich state that clothes itself in governmental impoverishment.

Gov. George Deukmejian was quick to reassure California voters that Proposition 111’s gasoline tax increase wasn’t the first step toward higher property and income taxes. He was savvy, politically, but wrong, pragmatically. If we don’t quickly rehabilitate our social system, California will have a healthy transportation backbone connecting a tissue of dying communities.

How do we build a transportation network that fosters a sense of community? How do we stop the collision of cultures from transforming California into a racist society? How do we balance the freedom of mobility with commitment to a shared future?

Persuading Californians to invest in schools, clinics and other people-related services will prove far more difficult than selling gridlocked commuters a highway construction program. But there is no higher mission for the next governor than to renew our social contract to serve the human needs of Californians. And no more realistic, and politically courageous, message to send to Washington than the signal inherent in the passage of Proposition 111.

Read California’s lips: “Yes, (pause, groan) new taxes.”