The state of California — 2

I don't want to take up your time telling you things you already know about the racial and ethnic situation in California. My visit (see also the preceding posting) probably didn't introduce me to any facts I was previously unaware of, but it's one thing to know them, another to experience them. If you don't live in California or haven't been there in a while, a brief first-hand account might interest you.

Basically, the state of play is this: California is already the multi-ethnic society that our liberal masters want. It varies by area, of course: much more in the big cities, quite a bit in farming areas, not too much in rich people's turf like lovely Santa Barbara.

But when you look at the whole picture, you can see that mega-diversity is a fait accompli. Turn on the cable TV in your hotel room and you can find stations with programming in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, whatever-the-hell … Filipino, Urdu, I don't know, I got tired of channel surfing. Clement Street in San Francisco, where I lived for a short time in the '80s, is now overwhelmingly Asian, a second (or third or fourth) Chinatown. At Los Angeles airport, every announcement is made in English and Spanish, which makes the message feel as long as a speech by Fidel Castro. At the Monterey aquarium, it seemed like half the kids in the school groups were talking to each other (and their teacher) in Spanish. I won't go on multiplying examples — well, just one more because it seemed to me to symbolize at least one aspect of the multi-culti value sysem:

We got off the 101 freeway to drive through Oxnard, for no very good reason except that we were taking Route 1 all the way north on the coast and it seemed fitting to stay on it where it first diverges from 101 n0rth of Los Angeles. Oxnard is the center of an agricultural area, and the old downtown is basically Mexico with a generous helping of the universal culture of poverty: taquerias, grocerias, everything-erias, payday loans, car-repair shops for cars that have served their time. Not threatening, just sad. Other than the Mexican flavor, pretty much Grapes of Wrath.

I was ready to let it go at that -- annoyed, but not at the Mexicans, rather at the corporate overlords (with their court jesters in Washington) who have decided that our economy (i.e., their profits) require us to import poverty. But what I read in the Los Angeles Times the next day painted a bleaker picture (sorry, no link):

A state appellate court has affirmed almost all of Ventura County's injunction against a violent gang in Oxnard, objecting only to a provision that called for an overnight curfew. In a ruling Monday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal took exception with a provision that barred members of the Colonia Chiques who had been served with a copy of the injunction from being in public from 10 p.m. to dawn. The three-judge panel called this portion of the injunction "unconstitutionally vague." ... The injunction, announced in March 2004, established a 6.6-square-mile safety zone ... within which members of the gang were banned from assembling, flashing gang signs, fighting, possessing weapons, wearing gang colors or having an open container of alcohol.

Members of the Colonia Chiques, the county's largest gang with more than 1,000 members, have been suspects or victims in more than 40 homicides since 1992, authorities said. Oxnard Police Chief John Crombach has said gangs are responsible for 20% to 40% of all violent crime in the city and that the injunction has helped cut the number of homicides and aggravated assaults in the first half of 2007.

So here is the insanity that Open Borders has brought us to: instead of refusing these thugs admission to the country or giving them the bum's rush when they wind up in the clutches of the law, we let them in, then do back flips to try to establish a "safety zone" where they supposedly can't be their homicidal selves. We waste a good chunk of the municipal budget on hundreds of hours of the police's, prosecutors', and appellate judges' time to impose a curfew -- a bad precedent in a free society, and an admission that it can't touch the cause of trouble, only try to curtail its worst effects.

Is Oxnard atypical, the Colonia Chiques just a minor fringe phenomenon? Oxnard is only a small backwater. The article says that the Los Angeles City Attorney has obtained injunctions against 50 street gangs.

Given the plenitude of ethnic and racial diversity in California, I suppose it is arguable that it "works"; other than the incessant warfare between Mexican and black gangs in LA, there isn't a great deal of outright violence between groups. What I saw suggests that in ordinary, mainly work-related situations, people get along pretty well. I'll buy it that that is evidence of a certain goodwill. (Then again, my wife and I traveled in relatively ritzy areas like Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, the Marina District in San Francisco, not out of snobbery but because that's where the best scenery and accommodations, plus relative safety, are to be found. Possibly it's a different story in less affluent real estate.)

But a society needs more than just people managing not to knife or insult each other when they're thrown together. It needs genuine social interaction and a baseline of shared values. I don't think you find that much in California. The blacks and whites and Mexicans and Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese and the other hundred-odd cultures stick within their own tribes outside of working hours. They each have their own neighborhoods, their own stores, their own entertainment venues, their own ... well, just about everything.

Maybe this is, as our Diversity Gruppenfuhrers insist, the way of the future. Maybe eventually, in a few hundred years, it will work itself out into something no better but no worse than most human societies have experienced. But I have to say this: California is no longer part of the United States in any meaningful sense. It's a giant petri dish, a laboratory experiment to see whether a multi-cultural state can manage on any basis other than every tribe looking out for itself, and one (or more) tribes finding themselves at the bottom of the food chain.