Deaf and blind, California is deaf and blind.  I left it behind two years ago, but carried with me hopes that someday in the future it would revive itself.  When I left, I also left behind memories of the California that was – the state I moved to in the mid-1980’s that was a land of promise and in my case delivered on those promises.  My hopes for revival died on election night when the state elected Adam Schiff to the US Senate.  You remember Schiff – the man that spent Trump’s entire first term on TV lying about “Russia, Russia, Russia.”  When it was all said and done, Schiff had reduced himself to a laughingstock.  So, California decided to give him a promotion – killing my hope.  And now, a little more than a month after the election, there are nails being driven into the coffin of my hopes.

Most people have seen recordings of Kamala Harris’ address to the DNC staff at their holiday party and dismissed it as simply pathetic.  Harris is pure, unadulterated California and it the wake of her massive failure as a propped up POTUS candidate, is weighing a run for the California governor’s job.  And yet, anecdotally, I have had a few too many California friends express admiration and agreement with her vacant, “feels-based” speech.  It was her substance-less, feels-based campaign that failed so miserably, so I guess she is going to leave the national stage on that same note – and California seems prepared to buy it.

A harbinger.

My California career was in service to the manufacturing industry, for the last century the traditional source of blue-collar, no-degree-required jobs in this nation.  During WWII, California exploded into a manufacturing powerhouse.  I have watched California quite intentionally drive manufacturing out over the last several decades, and with it so many jobs not requiring college degrees have left the state.  The middle-class has been hollowing out in California at a very rapid pace.

But no worries, into this gap current California governor Gavin Newsom is willing to step with “a blueprint to create more well-paying careers for Californians, especially those who don’t have a college degree.”  Nah, I think I am going to worry.  Mostly the plan is for vocational education.  Please!  For one thing, being educated for a non-existent job is not very helpful.  But secondly, the teacher’s union has a death grip on the state.  To increase its power, which adding educational programs is sure to do, is probably smart patronage for Newsom but also a guarantee of more of the failed policies that have driven the state close to oblivion.

But it is the non-educational parts of the “blueprint” that are really frightening:

Newsom also announced plans Monday to double the number of state jobs that will no longer require a college degree or other specific educational requirements, from nearly 30,000 currently to about 62,000 next year….A high school degree will no longer be required for custodians. Some state investigator positions will allow more areas of study or experience, such as military service, to count as qualifications.

Lord have mercy.  This too is, if you will note, a nod to the teacher’s union failures.  Newsom is literally lowering the educational bar.  All the while making people more beholding to his party and its failed policies.

California is indeed deaf and blind to the lessons of the election just past.  The rest of the nation should be afraid; we cannot afford to have California become an anchor holding the rest of us behind.  Right now, California still has an economic engine – Silicon Valley – that keeps it afloat, barely.  But Silicon Valley is best known for learning fast and leaving the pyrite (formerly golden) state at an increasing pace.

California’s failures have, to date, threatened only California.  But as those failures begin to bear fruit, the failure of California threatens the rest of us.  It may be time to formulate a plan to deal with a fully failed California – it shows no signs of reversing course.

POSTSCRIPT:  I have received more than one annual Christmas letter from friends expressing their dismay at the outcome of the election.  My voting lifetime is now at about 50 years.  In those five decades, I am batting about .500 in terms of my pleasure or dismay at the outcome of an election.  Also in those five decades I have never had a need or desire to express that pleasure or dismay in a Christmas letter.  I like it that way, quite a bit.

If you are still working on your Christmas letter, please, leave the politics out of it.