Friends
call. Acquaintances email. (I don’t text, Facebook, or Tweet.) (But my
students still are shocked that I know what’s what.) The message of
concern: “Dov, I heard about
the earthquake. Are you OK?”
Yes, I’m OK.
It
was a 6.4, but I slept through this one. Before I moved from the New
York City area to The Homeless State thirty-some years ago, back when it
was called The Golden State, I used to think that earthquakes were like
the
Torah’s description of what became of Korach and his rebellion against Moses:
Scarcely
had he finished speaking all these words when the ground under them
split asunder, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with
their households, all Korach’s people and all their possessions. They
went down alive into
Sheol, with all that belonged to them; the
earth closed over them, and they vanished from the midst of the
congregation. (Numbers 16:31-33)
I thought — no
fault of
mine — that was how California earthquakes were: the earth splits and
opens, and buildings and houses fall in. I arrived here and —
whew! — learned quickly enough:
Not so!
Rather, the earth shakes a few moments, sometimes for seconds, rarely
even a minute. And then it is over. The game then immediately begins,
as we argue with each other and even lay bets over the exact number: Was
it a 2.8? A 3.2? No way over a 4.0!
Well, this one was a
6.4, but its epicenter was outside California’s largest media markets
of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.
When I first
moved here, I remember walking one day in a multi-level indoor parking
lot to retrieve my car. As I walked along the ramp, I felt the floor
rattling, hovering up and down a bit, as each car raced by, some driving
up the ramps, others down. I immediately hustled to the security
station to report my sense that the ramps and the structure were about
to collapse. The security guard knowingly laughed:
“You’re new to California, huh?” he giggled.
“Yeah, how did you know?”
He laughed.
It
turns out that California really has earthquakes figured out. The
parking lots, the bridges, the roadways, residential buildings — all are
built on a foundation and with construction that is ever-so-slightly
less rigid than elsewhere in the universe. It is constructed with a bit
of “give” so that any time the earth shakes, the ramp / bridge /
building can rattle a bit and yet not crack from rigidity. It really is
brilliant. That is why earthquakes of such smaller magnitude kill so
many hundreds and thousands in India, Iran, Iraq, and other places
spelled that way, as well as in Mexico and other places to our south,
while they barely register on the catastrophe scale in California.
California learned from the Great San Francisco quake and others later
how to alleviate the quakes.
Likewise, the way we set up
and furnish our homes. I have a personal library of more than 4,000
books — Torah, Talmud, Judaic Legal Code (
halakhic), and
Rabbinic Responsa literature in Hebrew, Aramaic, and English; scores of
secular American law horn books and legal treatises; a full library of
American history and American civics; another of Jewish history and
sociology; another of broad-based theology; and a copy of Hitler’s “Mein
Kampf” that I keep amid a shelf of books about the Irgun and the Jewish
Underground’s fight for Israel independence.
That means I have
approximately 15-20 full-height bookcases. In California, the day after
the movers settle you into a home with such a library, you have the
Handyman or Earthquake Guy come over and bolt each bookcase into the
wall. They find the wall’s wood beams with the “geiger counter” thing a
person can buy in any hardware store. They nail one end of a very
strong strap or other slightly flexible securing device into the beam,
and they nail the other end into the bookcase.
When a shaker hits, the
bookcase maybe rattles a bit, maybe a few books fall out, but it
withstands the quake because the bookcase is secured firmly even as the
strap has that flexible “give” that prevents it from snapping.
Likewise, you keep your expensive Baccarat crystal vases and Kosta Boda
crystal bowls away from the edges of your surfaces. That’s it.
The only ones who take a really nasty hit are the owners of liquor stores.
Ouch!
Sure, when the epicenter is closer to a heavily populated and more concentrated metropolis — like the 6.9 Great
World Series Quake of
1989 that hit, of all times, amid the Fall Classic’s third game between
the San Francisco Giants and the neighboring Oakland Athletics — that
has a more devastating impact. Likewise, the 6.7
Northridge Quake of
1994 that hit the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles particularly
hard. But even then, even with bridge and road damage, with structures
ruined and injuries, the sophistication in earthquake preparedness
alleviates catastrophe and results in comparatively minimal human loss
of life.
We Californians are amazed, given the relative
infrequency of earthquakes here and even greater infrequency of
destructive ones, how our non-California friends, relatives, and
associates get freaked-out when they hear about a quake. We look at
each other and wonder how people, whose truly deadly and perilously
fatal Midwestern tornadoes, Southeastern hurricanes, Heartland floods,
Northeastern ice storms and blizzards, and Urban Democrat-Controlled
Inner-City Mass Shootings can sit there, fretting over a shaker that
comes once every, oh,
whenever.
The
reality is that people concerned about California earthquakes focus on
the wrong 6.4 temblor. Don’t worry about the shakers; they can be
minimized, and they pass. The ones that are toxic and endemic are the
Democrats who turned California into a one-dog town and destroyed the
Golden State.
The
reality is that people concerned about California earthquakes focus on
the wrong 6.4 temblor. Don’t worry about the shakers; they can be
minimized, and they pass. The ones that are toxic and endemic are the
Democrats who turned California into a one-dog town and destroyed the
Golden State. Not all that long ago, California elected great governors
like George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, and they gave us great judges
and courts. This state elected Ronald Reagan as governor. If he does get
elected governor, he does not emerge with the “bona fides” to make it
to President. If he does not make it to President, we now could be in
either our tenth or twentieth year under some Ayatollah or President
Vladimir Putin or in the eighth term of Tsar Bernie the Breadline.
(Breadlines are a good thing.)
When I arrived here in 1987 to become rabbi of, like, a congregation in, like, Woodland Hills in, like, The Valley —
What . . . eh . . . ver! —
Southern California still had its Golden sheen. People were so polite
that they did not even jaywalk; they were not in such a rush anyway.
And if some visiting rude New Yorker did jaywalk, cars stopped in the
middle of the street to let them cross. It was not New York City. It
really was La-dee-da. La-La Land.
Decades of Illegal Immigration changed all that. In fact, for once and for all, let’s stop calling them “Illegals.” They are not “Illegals.” Let’s start calling them what they really are: Imported Voters.
Imported
Voters changed all that. The Imported Voters came from dire poverty,
with limited English skills and limited passion for our Declaration of
Independence and Constitution. They came to escape the dregs amid them
in search of safety, free food, free shelter, free healthcare, free
education, free college, free-free-free. The Democrats promised them
all that, and the Imported Voters reciprocated by giving the Democrats
the only thing required: their votes. As a result, California underwent a
6.4 social earthquake — and the epicenter was
anywhere and everywhere that people live.
When you offer free food, people lacking food flood in.
Get it? Offer free medical care, and guess what? Offer free this and free that, and guess what?
In the end, the Streets of San Francisco today are not what Karl Malden encountered in his 1970s TV show. Rather, today’s modern Frisco is comprised of sidewalks filled with the mentally ill and the addicted — people to whom Lombardi Street seems straight.
Likewise in Los Angeles. Instead of extending compassion to The
Homeless and bringing them in for mental care and addiction treatment,
the Compassionate Progressives throw money at them on the sidewalks.
Free needles. Free this, free that.
And guess what? The
Sanctuary City Mayors can’t figure out why — but instead of the massive
money allocations curing and reducing the homeless epidemics here, the
cash infusions instead have attracted
even more homeless from
everywhere else,
doubling and even trebling the street situation. They are humans, and
they need to defecate and micturate. Without toilets, they do so on the
streets. Their food left-overs, with their excretory by-products,
brings rats and even typhus.
Remember when Hyphen-Cortez complained about that? I don’t either.
This
is the state that Gavin Newsom (rhymes with “gruesome”) governs and
that Kamala Harris would ride to the White House. They destroyed
something beautiful for all but the wealthy. Under their Progressive
Caring, The Homeless State now is populated primarily by the Very
Wealthy and the Profoundly Destitute. The Middle Class has fled the high
taxes, the crazy gasoline prices, the insane home costs exacerbated by
the most exacting of zoning laws that the Very Wealthy impose to
minimize new home construction in their neighborhoods and thereby
maintain exorbitant real estate values. In Silicon Valley, the very
wealthy flourish. They eat their meals in their high-tech facilities to
avoid the “riff raff” they Progressively and Compassionately despise.
They live in lily-white neighborhoods, surrounded by big beautiful walls
and armed guards, to keep out the “riff-raff” and to assure that their
children never have to encounter them in exclusive school.
They make movies in Georgia. Think about that
Alyssa Milano boycott thing: The boycott threat arises because
Hollywood makes its movies and TV shows in
Georgia. Why? Does Idaho grow its potatoes in Florida? Why doesn’t
Hollywood make films in
Hollywood anymore?
Answer: Because they refuse to pay the exorbitant taxes they and their
Compassionate Progressive failed social programs have imposed on
everyone else. Therefore, they set up tax homes in nearby Arizona and
Nevada, both tax-free states.
There remain pockets of California that remain what was. Many parts of San Diego. And despite the
ballot-harvesting fiasco of the 2018 bi-election, Orange County is Republican and conservative, except for a few pockets.
I insisted this after
the Democrats ballot-harvested the Congressional seats, and some on the
Left challenged my assertion. Then the 2019 elections came — less than a
year later — and the Republican conservative
handily won the
election for Orange County supervisor, beating the very famous Democrat
Left Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez along the way. His biggest problem
was that five other conservative Republicans also ran and split votes.
The Democrat Sanchez? A
bare 37 percent. The rest went to Republicans.
Thus, if you must focus on a California earthquake,
that is
where the focus should lie. The Democrats have destroyed so much that
once was Golden. They have micturated our money on Trains-to-Nowhere, on
medicare and medicaid and medics for Imported Voters, on free college
for Imported Voters — at the expense of the children of taxpaying
citizens who sustain those colleges, but who must either send their kids
to colleges out of state or bribe athletic coaches to put their kids on
the rowing teams. It is a shame that what once was, no longer is, and
perhaps never shall be again.
Perhaps.
The
writer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California
law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values,
congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and
has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and
other Jewish organizations. Other writings are
collected at www.rabbidov.com .
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24116
