California is Broken

When I first arrived in Fresno a couple months ago, after having been away for a year, I told my friends there (both of whom are natives) about my impressions of the state upon my return.

"It feels like everything is falling apart here," I said. "Everything feels dysfunctional."

"Every interaction I've had here with people in public seems somehow off. It's as if miscommunication is built into every exchange between strangers here."

They knew what I was talking about.  In a way it is the opposite of New York City. Years ago when I was living there, I wrote a blog post (on a now-defunct blog) about how New York reminded me of the Bob Dylan song "Everything is Broken."

By that I meant to imply that the physical structure of New York, and the systems of the real, physical world, seemed to antiquated, half-functioning, and falling apart. Yet society still continued to operate. The subways kept running. The cars kept moving on the highways. And moreover, the social fabric of New York seemed remarkably intact despite all this.

In California, it feels like just the opposite. On the surface, the physical systems seem just fine. The cities look very nice, much better than even a couple decades ago, and the suburbs are miraculous. Yet the social fabric seemed to be in advanced decay.

In New York, there was a feeling of social cohesion, that "we are all in this together." In California, despite the surface beauty,  I can't escape a feeling that everyone here knows that it is dog-eat-dog, that it is everyone for himself or herself.

Part of it is is perhaps that this is the West Coast, and everyone here is "experimenting on themselves," as a friend of mine said who once lived in Los Angeles.

Or as my friend in Fresno said, who grew up on the East Coast, "It's like the establishment in New York and Washington D.C. is so far away and don't care about us. We're sitting in the back of the class throwing spit balls at each other."

But that doesn't explain it all. In the almost thirty years that I've been coming year, it feels as if this trend has been accelerating.