EPILOGUE

OUR CHARGE
 MY HOME

“The American community in early California fairly

represented, as we shall see, the average national culture
and character. But no other part of our land was ever so
rapidly peopled as was California in the first golden days.
Nowhere else were we Americans more affected than here,
in our lives and conduct, by the feeling that we stood in
the position of conquerors in a new land. Nowhere else,
again, were we ever before so long forced by circumstance to
live at the mercy of a very wayward chance, and to give to
even our most legitimate business a dangerously speculative
character. Nowhere else were we driven so hastily to
improvise a government for a large body of strangers; and
nowhere else did fortune so nearly deprive us for a little
time of our natural devotion to the duties of citizenship.
We Americans therefore showed, in early California, new
failings and new strength. We exhibited a novel degree of
carelessness and overhastiness, an extravagant trust in luck,
a previously unknown blindness to our social duties, and an
indifference to the rights of foreigners, whereof we cannot
be proud. But we also showed our best national traits—

203
204 Join the conversation — #ANewCaliforniaDream

traits that went far to atone for our faults. As a body, our
pioneer community in California was persistently cheerful,
energetic, courageous, and teachable. In a few years it had
repented of its graver fault, it had endured with charming
good humor their severest penalties, and it was ready to
begin with fresh devotion the work whose true importance
it had now at length learned—the work of building a well-
organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific
Coast. In this work it has been engaged ever since.”
—Josiah Royce192

I was blessed to have an idyllic childhood. I grew up in

Paradise Valley, a small enclave of homes on nestled in the San
Gabriel Mountains. My backyard was a canyon filled beautiful
oak trees. Down the middle of the canyon was a picturesque
stream, providing fodder for Tom Sawyer adventures
engineering dams and exploring the great unknown. The
neighborhood had a local homeowners association, which
provided a convenient reason for barbecues. At every event, the
homeowners association brought a bar with a series of plaques
detailing the associations’ past presidents and the parties it
had thrown since the 1960’s. In neighborhood lore, after a
particularly big night, one of my neighbors—who shall remain
nameless—rode the bar drunkenly down the street from the
party to their house. The place was happy, alive, carefree—
truly paradise.
Over the years, though, things started to sour. The
transformation was slow but sure. Some of the fun neighbors
moved out. The neighborhood parties started to become
more ritual than lively get togethers. The leaders of the
Homeowners Association became pettier, making more of a
point to get reimbursed for every last party expense. Pivotally,
 Our Charge 205

the neighborhood became fractured over whether to allow the

county to build a bigger debris basin. Paradise Valley is located
on the edge of the San Gabriel National Forest. Historically,
whenever there is a fire, as there is inevitably is in drought prone
Southern California, mudflows follow shortly after. The fire
burns up all the shrubs and trees holding the mountain in place;
hence the need for the debris basin. Some people didn’t want
an expanded basin, though, because it would be an eyesore and
would somehow lead to increased development. My parents,
both experienced in water policy, and other members of the
community disagreed, arguing that an expanded dam was
necessary. The resulting fight was ugly and too often personal.
Ultimately the expanded dam didn’t get built. Just like the rest
of the state, my neighborhood wasn’t willing to make the hard
choices that were in the best interest of the place.
The fights in the neighborhood would only get worse.
The neighbors that moved in often looked different than the
neighbors that left. Like California, my neighborhood was
becoming an increasingly diverse place. Reflecting larger
trends, our neighbor immediately below us—an extremely nice
elderly white woman—sold the house which she had bought
for the incredible price of roughly $25,000 in 1961 for well
over a million dollars in 2007. I vividly remember the day
she moved out: her standing above, giggling about now being
a millionaire, as a nice new family moved in—friends, in fact,
as we would later find out, of my good buddy Ahmad. The
new family, though, wanted to build a second story so that
the grandparents could live with them, and, like all growth
in a small community, this was immediately controversial.
The neighbors two doors down from my house led the fight,
claiming that the elevated story would allow new family to
spy into their yard. A cacophony of unease ensued: “Paradise
206 Join the conversation — #ANewCaliforniaDream

Valley would be ‘mansionized’ if we let the precedent of a

second story stand.” “The new family really just wanted to
flip the house to turn a quick buck.” The fact that the elderly
woman who had sold them the house selected them in part
because the wanted to raise their children in the neighborhood
got lost in the heated discourse.
Of course, you can’t tell this story without mentioning again
that the new family was Muslim and most of the people active in
the Homeowners Association were white. I remember hearing
my neighbors say thing like “well now I guess they’re going
to put up a bunch of gaudy columns in front of their house.”
Still, while race likely was some motivation, I find it unlikely
that any of my neighbors were overtly motivated by racism.
I’ve found too many of them be too open hearted towards too
many people—whatever their background—to blanketly label
them with something as simplistic as the word “racist.” What
is certain, however, is that these actions conveyed a certain
distrust at the otherness of the new neighbors—the fact that
they were new to the community, looked a bit different, likely
had a somewhat alien belief system—that, although difficult to
parse apart, signified deep fractures in the neighborhood.
My parents through all this—ever the fans of good
government and being reasonable to a fault—tried to work with
the new family. My parents negotiated with them about the
second story’s impact on our view and reached an agreement.
My father, who was on the city planning commission in the
early 1990’s, told our neighbors that the two story expansion
was consistent with the General Plan and should be approved.
But the neighbors below them were dogmatically opposed.
Rallying the neighborhood on the charge that the new family
would be able to see into their backyard (which was odd since
you could already see into their backyard from our house),they
took their case to the planning commission. They lost, since
 Our Charge 207

they really didn’t have a substantive case, but they appealed the
ruling to the La Canada City Council. Filling the chambers
with angry voters, the neighborhood argued their case against
the new family and ultimately won. The La Canada City
Council Members showed their true colors that day, proving
that they were more willing to listen to a mob of angry voters
than to do what was right, an all too common occurence in
contemporary California politics.
A couple years later, the inevitable happened. On August
26, 2009, the hills above Los Angeles burst into flame in what
would become the largest fire in Los Angeles history. The
station fire consumed more than 160,000 acres and burned
over 200 homes. The fire burned to the very edge of Paradise
Valley, coming within twenty or so feet from burning my
neighbors’ homes. Meanwhile I was back in Claremont, fully
enmeshed in football camp, forced to watch impotently as the
fires raged near the home I grew up in. Most infuriatingly, I
heard stories about rubberneckers and looky loos flooding the
street below my house to get a better view of the destruction.
I could understand that people wanted to see the beautiful
pyrocumulous clouds, but sipping lemonade and potentially
blocking the street for emergency personal is beyond
disrespectful. Similarly, watching California self-destruct may
make for some interesting intellectual inquiry for East Coast
writers—allowing them to formulate some grand commentary
about the nature of our society or the failed structure of our
initiative process. But, as a Californian, such schadenfraude
smacks of petty jealousy—the dork laughing at the cool kid
for crashing his BMW. It’s the sort of thing that can drive a
reasonable person to unforgiving anger: idiots blithely laughing
while people like my parents who dedicated their lives to
making this a better place huddle like refugees in my mother’s
classroom.
208 Join the conversation — #ANewCaliforniaDream

With the dry shrubs of the Los Angeles National Forest

now burned to a crisp, the mountains above my home were
now little more than a giant pile of dirt—waiting, looming,
biding its time until the rains began to fall. That winter the
rain came, proving once again that the sunshine doesn’t last
forever—even in Los Angeles. Winter turned into a blur of
evacuations and relocations for my parents. The neighborhood
began to look like a war zone. The county put up K-rails to
direct the mud away from people’s homes, and sandbags were
everywhere. Eventually, though, on that fateful February night,
the mountain came down. The mud roared down my street,
destroying several of my neighbors’ homes and washing away
the county’s attempts to control nature. Soon after, FEMA
declared Paradise Valley a national disaster area. My home,
the place where I grew up in, was on the news as a disaster
area. You never think about something like that happening to
your home, just like California used to never doubt that it was
exceptional.
But there was a silver lining, like there always is. My
neighbors in the two houses below me, the epicenter of the
second story controversy, were talking again, trying to figure out
how to keep the inevitable mudslide from pouring into their
homes again. In the face of immense challenges, sometimes
we remember that our petty differences are just that—petty.
This then is my hope for California. That in the thick of an
unending budget crisis, a dragging economy, and a growing
sense of a darker tomorrow, we remember that we really are
all in this together. That in the face of a political system too
polarized to engage in anything but paralysis, we remember
that in a democracy we, the people, are the rulers of our own
destiny. That despite whatever people say about California
being a perverse playground, a wonderland of psychedelic
eccentricities gone wrong, we remember how blessed we are to
 Our Charge 209

live in such an awesomely beautiful place, filled with the most

creative people from around the world.
California, by being a petri dish of different cultures,
habitats, and worldviews, is naturally suited to be a hub in our
increasingly connected world. This Ecumenopolis, as Kevin
Starr puts it, stands poised to be the crossroads nation of the
21rst century and in that sense a laboratory for humanities
future.  A century and a half ago, Californians were called the
Argonauts because, like Jason and his band of Greek heroes,
we were willing to brave treacherous oceans, snow-capped
mountains, and sun-scorched deserts in the pursuit of gold and
a better life. But today we are Argonauts in a much deeper
sense. Contemporary Los Angeles is the most diverse region
in human history.193 California has four of the top fifteen
universities in the entire world.194 California’s technology
companies are reinventing the ways in which we connect to
each other and even how we see ourselves as human beings.
We are humanity writ large, and highlighting aspects of our
better nature.
Prior to the Gold Rush, the world was in a state of upheaval.
Tectonic forces – imperialism, nationalism, radicalism –
collided, and the earthquakes that plague human existence
ripped life apart. Recently humiliated in the Opium War,
China was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Europe was
in the grip of revolution, and country after country was cleaved
in two. The discovery of gold in California cut through these
fractures, offering a tantalizing dream of a better life. Just a few
months after the French revolution, a French journal reported
out of California that “Our agriculture, our commerce,
our industry and our capital of all kinds can draw greatest
advantages from the movement initiated by the discovery of
great treasure in California. Let us then not lose this chance
to increase our riches and to efface from our memory the
210 Join the conversation — #ANewCaliforniaDream

suffering of the past year.”195 Jean-Nicolas Pertlot, a young

French cotemporary, noted that “The gold fever succeeded the
revolutionary or reactionary fever...”196 Today the world is in a
similar state of upheaval, as we find ourselves struggling to deal
with a changing climate and the reverberations of the worst
financial crisis since the Great Depression.
California’s government is ground zero for dysfunctional
responses to these problems. We continually struggle to simply
pass a budget, let alone invest in our aging infrastructure,
reform our tangled regulatory system, or provide a quality
education to far too many of California’s children. But these
failures create a huge opportunity for good governance. If
we remember our proud heritage, focus pragmatically on the
problems facing us, and understand our common destiny, we
can rebuild our government and finally get California to realize
its golden potential. And like in 1848, this New California
Dream will serve as a shining symbol for the idea that we
can create a better life in this world. Which is important.
Humanity has problems, so as the Atwaterian mantra goes,
“Why not solve them?”
With that in mind, I would like to end by asking the reader
a favor: please do not assume this project is over with the simple
conclusion of a book. There are too many problems facing
and too much potential latent in California for such a cheap
goodbye. The inscription above the State Supreme Court
Building in Sacramento reads “Bring me men to match my
mountains.” You can say a lot of things about California right
now, but you can’t say there aren’t mountains—geographic,
cultural, intellectual, economic, technological, social,
political—here. Just ask Charles. Let us have the courage to
meet them.