Southland Dreams, Reality Are Polls Apart

The obstetrician who delivered my daughter a little over a year ago just became a father himself.

So now he is leaving Southern California for good.

“This is a real tough place to raise kids,” he says.

He and his wife and baby daughter are heading to small-town North Carolina, where it is presumably safer, quieter, cheaper, cleaner, slower and just better for a family such as his.

Only his family sounds a lot like mine and those of my friends.

The doctor and his wife don’t stray too far on weekends because the traffic strains their nerves and hogs their time. Workday commuting is already too much.

Money, meantime, seems to evaporate in the Southern California smog. And stories in the newspapers, on the local news, usually make them cringe. It’s bad news for families right and left.

“A lot of my friends in the medical field tell me that they wish they could leave too,” he says. “I tell them that they can. You just find a way.”

Last month, this newspaper ran the results of its latest telephone survey of 1,586 people in the six counties of Southern California.

The poll, which has a margin of error of 3% either way, said that 71% of us think things are dandy on the streets where we live. Most people said that they hadn’t considered moving in the past 12 months.

But I still don’t believe that this could possibly be true.

What about our dreams , our hopes? Aren’t lots of us yearning for more simple pleasures, like clean air?

Wouldn’t many of us leave if someone could just make it easy for us, say, by providing us with a job, some friends and a house? Maybe the poll didn’t have a box to check for that.

Or maybe the California dream is already dead and in the ground. Is this really as good as it gets? Perhaps we have come to accept it better than we did.

(Then again, maybe I just hang with a pretty malcontent crowd).

Still, the anecdotal evidence is strong that something is wrong here, something big. And many people think the wrong is gaining ground. Too many bodies in too small a place. It can produce what we call “societal ills.”

Many of us watch and hope that the sickness doesn’t come too close.

The other day I was traveling north on the 405. The traffic, in Southern Californian terms, was light. Cars were moving fast.

A car and a pickup truck were about to enter the car pool lane at the same time. But the car “won” by a hair, so the truck speeded up to tailgate at speeds that must have approached 80 m.p.h., if I had to guess.

The driver of the car soon retaliated in turn. He sped ahead, then braked. This went on for a while, until the car pulled off on the shoulder and the truck flashed by.

Then the car’s driver jerked his sedan back on the freeway, burning rubber and overtaking the truck once again. Haha. I guess this meant that he won.

(I watched until they were out of view, figuring I’d be a witness when somebody ended up dead.)

I tell this story because it is hardly unique. Maybe it’s stress, or a bad mood. Then again, how about the excesses of youth, just plain bad manners, or macho cool? Or maybe the drivers simply feared being late.

Whatever. It’s a symptom, just another something to shrug off until it joins with other somethings and pretty soon, you’re talking a full-blown syndrome with an elusive, expensive cure. It seems everybody’s got a Southern California story, an apocalyptic tale where the punch line is always, “Enough!”

A friend told me about the scene he witnessed while waiting at a traffic light near a railroad track in Brea the other day. One driver in a line of cars wasn’t paying too much attention to what was ahead; he stopped on the tracks and found himself sandwiched in.

So this man got out of his pickup truck and stomped toward the car in front. He screamed obscenities at the driver and threatened him with this and that. The car’s driver clutched his steering wheel without saying a word.

My friend said he was working on a plan while all this was going down. He would simply run the guy over and that would be the end of that.

Yes, it has come to this.

OK, so maybe my friend really wouldn’t have run this guy down. But he wanted to. It would have made him feel good . He would have, temporarily at least, conquered the evil in his own back yard.

It is frustration, and fear, that’s driving people away. My obstetrician says it’s his daughter and perhaps a sibling after that. He worries about the shocking permissiveness of parents who rue, after the fact, that maybe their child really shouldn’t have been hanging with that crowd. Ah, but what could they do?

A colleague, a family man, was complaining the other day about trying to fish with his sons at one of the local artificial lakes. All the boats were rented; people were elbow to elbow along the shore. Fish had been dumped into the water before.

A native Southern Californian, he longed for escape.

“You know in the Northwest, they throw stones at us, call us names,” he says. “Well, maybe we should do the same to the outsiders who come here.”

More idle threats, antisocial behavior to which we will probably never succumb. Still, the fantasy remains.

Or maybe not. If you believe the polls.