It is said that an addict has to “hit bottom” before they will actually change.  Hitting bottom is defined, “reaching the lowest possible point, state, or condition, often characterized by intense misery, failure, or despair.”  I am beginning to wonder if California has a bottom to hit.

Two stories in just the last 24 hours.  One, “California is giving free sex-change procedures to homeless illegal aliens.”  You would think that insane, but it is not.  When the media is in lockstep, insanity seems normalized.  Per student spending in the Los Angeles School District has more than doubled in the last 10 years and yet the schools are running out of toilet paper and cleaning supplies?!  How, exactly, does that work?

Last night my wife and I watched the recent film noir “Crime 101.”  It is a dark and sordid tale of thieves and robbers and cheats double crossing each other at every turn and where even the seeming “good guy” is severely smeared with muck and mayhem, being a murdering thief himself.  We both thought it the perfect, if intense, ode to our former home.  Everything – tainted and unpleasant in some fashion.

But like everyone in the movie, everyone in California seems satisfied with the status quo – they cannot imagine a better place, so they can never realize just how close to the bottom they really are.  I think this is because they no longer have any bearings to decide what is good and what is not.  So pervasive and so insidious is Trump Derangement Syndrome that when he presents good ideas they cannot see them, they cannot hear them – all they know is “Orange man bad” and anything else, even the misery and lunacy that is California, is preferable.

The problem is an addict can drag a whole family down.  The family, compassionately, is never willing to let the addict suffer the deepest consequences of their addiction.  Subsequently, the addict never finds bottom and the whole family swirls around the drain with them.  Anyone that has worked with addicts has seen it happen.

I fear the time is approaching where the nation may have to let California suffer the full consequences of its lunacy.  Like the family letting the addict hit bottom, it will hurt, it will hurt a lot.  Too much money flows through California. Too many goods and services are imported through California.  Chances are good we will have to federalize parts of California as it rots on the vine for the sake of the rest of the nation – an odious thought of itself, but preferable to joining California in the drain.

What I do know is this – California is becoming a problem that the rest of the nation can no longer merely look at and laugh derisively.  It is dragging the nation down with it.  I currently have no solutions, but the time is at hand for our best and brightest to begin to ponder them.

ADDENDUM: I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but two hours after posting this –

LA County quality of life hits record low, UCLA survey finds

And yet, the story finds a way to blame Republican policies despite the fact there is not a Republican in sight.