Today Versus Tomorrow

My grandparents are gone now, and so I cannot ask them about the old days. I cannot ask what made their generation so different. They helped create much of what is California today. With tax dollars and ballot box mandates, they helped build the freeways, waterways and, most important, public schools. They did this without much complaint, and even after their own children were grown, gone from home.

Perhaps they believed that they owed it, that one generation was obligated to create a better place for the next. Perhaps they had political leaders who pushed them. Pat Brown was one, and I recall reading a speech he gave early on as governor. Disgruntled business executives had come to complain about taxes and make threats about moving on. Brown answered with a call for even more sacrifice.

He spoke of building more schools and infrastructure, not to meet immediate needs, but to ensure “a greater future.” He spoke of developing water and electrical plants: “We may not like new taxes, but the alternative is a weak California burdened with fears, handicapped by inadequate state services and threatened with debt. Industry would not thrive in such an unhealthy economic climate.”

Try to imagine a governor saying that today, to us, in this California.

*

In this California, we have a governor, Pete Wilson, who openly embraces the idea--a dubious usage--of booting children from school because their parents lack the proper paperwork. This is crafty politics, catering to a collective unease about shifting demographics. How it might affect future generations is less than clear, although a safe guess is that xenophobia will not be the most useful trait to take into the 21st Century.

In this California, elected officials coddle businesses. They cut taxes, roll back worker safety laws, relax pollution controls. Anything to keep the CEOs content. This is done to great applause. If the companies stay, it means maybe no more jobs will be lost. As for industrial pollution and worker safety and the tax base--well, our children and grandchildren can tackle those little leftovers later, on their own watch.

In this California, no one dares advocate attacking the root causes of crime--too messy, too hard, bad politics. Better to crank up the punishment, create at least the appearance of response. And so prisons are built at a pace unknown to the civilized world, while Sacramento legislators churn out “anti-crime” measures like the “three strikes” charade. To keep up, something like 25 new prisons will be required in the next five years. This will cost billions upon billions of dollars, and who says the money might be better spent on schools?

No, in this California, a state that once taught the nation how to educate children, people snicker about the sorry state of the public school system. It is considered a major accomplishment in Sacramento when funding can be maintained at current cracker state levels. Free college education, once a California birthright, is now considered a luxury, beyond our means. Jack up the fees. Let the kids pay their own way. So what if we didn’t? This is different. This is today.

*

In this California, Wilson has dug out of a deep hole to overtake Kathleen Brown. A Times Poll last week indicated that the incumbent is well-positioned on three of four major issues--crime, immigration, economics. This was no surprise. Wilson might lack vision. He might, as a transplanted Midwesterner, not fathom what it once meant to come of age in California. Still, he knows how to push hot buttons, play to immediate fears. He knows the politics of today.

And that is how the campaign, so far, has been framed. The big issues have been debated in the present tense, with scant reference to the future. Crime is about punishment, not prevention. Immigration is about deporting children, not about our role in a new, more complicated world. The economic debate concerns how to appease old industry, not create new. Save our skins today, that has been the chorus.

According to the poll, the sole issue on which Brown demonstrated strength was education. This was seen as weakness by those who interpret polls: Wilson can talk about locking up criminals, shunning immigrants, rescuing business. The fun stuff. His opponent is stuck with schools. And yet, Brown might have more running room than anyone imagines.

Education is fundamentally about the future--a tomorrow issue. Brown still has enough time and talent to play to this strength, to move the debate off the grim present and show this state what tomorrow could bring, to rekindle whatever it was that burned in earlier Californians, like my grandparents. Do this, and the race again becomes hers to lose. And here she has an advantage. The grandfather of her children is still around to tell her how he did it, in the old days.