The Promised Land
As a foreigner new to the US all those years ago, I quickly learned that you really couldn’t generalise too much about Americans — the place is far too diverse for that.
But there’s one thing that even then stood out as uniting the vast majority of Americans — the sense of unlimited personal entitlement that almost every American-born citizen seems to share. What changes from region to region, class to class, generation to generation, is how to fulfill that entitlement — by any means necessary? By hard work? By luck? With God’s help? With a gun?
And California… California was built on the assumption that natural and Governmental resources are infinite, cheap, and there for the taking, and a lot of this rubs off on even the most hardened communitarian after a while. The state’s official motto should probably be William Mulholland’s triumphant “There it is. Take it!”, shouted at the assembled masses as he opened the gates of the new publicly-funded LA Aqueduct, letting heavily-subsidised fresh water pour down into the LA basin from the now-parched Owens Valley in the 1920’s. When it comes to sharing and conserving limited resources such as water or road space, many Californians are likely to be totally at sea — for many, especially older Californians, resources were effectively infinite (the Government just looked after things and made it so), and there’s never been much need to notice them, let alone worry about sharing or conserving.
I’m reminded of this nearly every week as I walk up through the University of California campus in Berkeley. There’s a series of those hortatory flags or banners along the pathway, attached to the ornate light poles. One of the banners used to say: “Berkeley has taught me that the world is mine: all I have to do is reach out and take it.” I’d sort of hope that Berkeley might teach exactly the opposite, but never mind; California’s always been the Promised Land for the self-entitled.
