Going to America

or at least to California

Testing the theory about loving a place by going to see it, I’m packing a bear canister.

Name one thing more enjoyable than a plastic bucket full of freeze-dried beef stroganoff. My rule for backpacking is that I’ll do any trip that doesn’t require me to buy a bigger canister.

I’ve been taking short trips around California, trying to ask myself if I really think that the place is worth sticking it out. I still don’t know the answer. But take a moment to read this just absolutely extraordinary thing, a description from the lavishly government funded Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles (or CHIRLA, the name you’re used to hearing in the news) of its Immigrant Political Power Project. This is the topic I’ve been working on this week, and it’s part of the reason why I’m headed into mountains for a few days.

That’s what we’re up against: not politics in the sense that people disagree, but a power struggle that relies on naked boundary-crossing and middle-finger-in-the-air aggression. They use our wonderful undocumented neighbor-friends to canvass neighborhoods and do get-out-the-vote work as political activists. And they just say so. They get taxpayer funds from city, county, state, and federal government, and then they run political phonebanks and send illegal immigrants door to door for political campaigns…

… which they just announce on their website.

And then, using government funding to support a voter canvass using illegal immigrants, they also endorse candidates for the elected offices that control the funding.

I discussed this at a local meeting of Republican activists tonight, and they gave me beer.

Can a place with this political culture be turned around? Is the place enough of a draw to overcome my aversion to the massively and pretty much openly corrupt systems, and the dirtbags who run those systems?

Ask me on Monday morning. But CHIRLA looks to me like a sign of unidirectional decline, even if the weather’s nice.