Nǐ hǎo, jiāzhōu!

Hello, California!

We are the Golden State’s two giant pandas, the first to enter the United States in two decades. And while it’s only been a few months since we departed southwest China for the San Diego Zoo, we’ve already met the governor, celebrities, TV broadcasters who love puns (“Panda-monium”), and thousands of everyday people, some of whom pay $115 to enter the zoo in the early morning and walk around with us for an hour. We now feel so at home in California that we’re wondering how we might take on the responsibilities of citizenship. For example, we hear so many of the people visiting us talking about your November elections.

So, why don’t you let us vote in them, too?

In asking this, we want to reassure you that we are reluctant to get political. Why take sides when we’re more popular than the Padres? (We never strike out, and we’re cuter than Jackson Merrill). The two of us are laidback types; zookeepers describe Yun, a 5-year-old male, as “mild-mannered, gentle and lovable,” and Xin, a 4-year-old female, as a “gentle and witty introvert with a sweet round face and big ears.”

And like so many of our fellow Californians, we ignore the news. We prefer to spend our time sunbathing, sleeping, and consuming as much grass as we can get our paws on. To clarify, our grass of choice is bamboo—the zoo grows eight species of it because we are picky.

We also must walk a fine line as “envoys of friendship,” in the words of the Chinese government, which loans us out to overseas zoos for $1 million a year. That means we and our fellow panda migrants—including old Sichuan friends who will soon head to the National Zoo in D.C. and perhaps the San Francisco Zoo—are really diplomats. And we represent a difficult client state that bullies its neighbors and inspires retaliatory tariffs and hateful rhetoric from a former-and-perhaps-future American president whose team uses the term “panda hugger” as a pejorative. (Pro tip: even if you love China, it’s best not to hug us—we are real animals, not stuffed bears.)

There are other reasons we might be wise to stay out of the political arena. For one thing, we are non-humans now living in a country that ranks low in the global Animal Protection Index. For another, we are newcomers to an America so deeply infected by xenophobia that a majority of voters support mass deportation of immigrants and their families. (Before JD Vance starts spreading lies about what we eat, let’s be clear—we are herbivores.)

Yet, despite all the ways in which we count as outsiders, we pandas, by our very presence, offer Americans a chance to understand your real challenges.

Try looking at things from our perspective. After all, we, like you, are a vulnerable species trying to survive on an increasingly inhospitable planet (there are fewer than 3,000 giant pandas in the world). We are also living proof that—in this age of moral relativism and lie-based politics—some very important things remain black and white.

Like the fact that true democracy requires the representation and participation of all living things.

Including us.

Sure, your human media is full of phony accusations that foreigners are voting in this year’s elections. They aren’t, but why shouldn’t they be able to? It’s increasingly common around the world for jurisdictions to open up local elections to non-citizens. San Francisco has done so for school board contests, for instance.

If we could vote in San Diego elections, we might cast a ballot for anyone who could stop the constant noise of jets flying low over us here in Balboa Park, as they prepare to land at the airport. Our participation also might raise the question of why we live rent-free in the expanded Panda Ridge complex while the city tears down encampments of the unhoused and allows the loss of hundreds of shelter beds.

Your national constitution has no prohibition against non-citizens voting—states, like yours decide. Unfortunately, California, while claiming to be a democracy defender, has decided to disenfranchise one in six of its adults based on citizenship, even though such people pay taxes, abide by the laws, serve in the military, and raise children who are citizens. California could enfranchise 6 million people by letting non-citizen residents vote.

It also could bring people together across national boundaries and create a framework for global political solutions if it reached agreements of “reciprocal voting” to allow Californians and residents of other states and countries to vote in each other’s elections.

Such a reciprocal system would demonstrate human interdependence. But interdependence on this planet encompasses all living things. Humans are less than 1% of the world’s biomass but have 100% of the world’s democratic rights. Plants are more than 80% of the biomass and are unrepresented, even though humans couldn’t live without them.

Providing representation to us animals and plants is not a new idea. There are efforts around the world to imagine democratic systems for various beings, including the Multispecies Constitution Project at the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute, where this column’s usual author is a fellow.

That project asks questions like: “What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?” The idea is that by incorporating the intelligence, experiences, values, and interests of other living things into governance, you humans will save ecosystems—and maybe yourselves. Intriguingly, some non-human creatures, like whales, are beginning to converse with you.

If the two of us could talk with you directly, instead of through the imagination of a human journalist, we might chat about the struggles of starting a family in California. We are a couple facing expectations to breed. And yes, San Diego is a great place to mate, and not just for all the sun-kissed humans in the beach-themed bars.

In fact, Yun’s grandparents lived at the zoo in the 2000s and had five cubs together here, including his mother Zhen Zhen. It seems unlikely that we’ll be that fertile. And we can’t know how long we’ll get to stay here, given the conflict between our birth country and our new home country.

But for now, we are Californians. Shouldn’t we have the same rights and responsibilities as all of you?

The post Why California Should Let Pandas Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lock up your tents, California!

Toss out your old camping gear!

Hide your pillows and blankets where the cops will never find them!

Because the people who run California have finally seen clearly that the greatest scourge in today’s Golden State is not climate change and not crime, not COVID and not corruption, not the rising cost of living nor grinding poverty.

No, what most threatens our way of life is people who camp.

And so, in this the year 2024, the great state of California has gone to war against campers and their encampments.

This war effort is unlike anything seen here in generations. The wheels of 21st-century California government move painfully slowly. It takes state and local agencies days to respond to a police call, a minimum of six months to permit a coffee shop, five years to add a carpool lane on a highway, and three decades (and counting) to construct a promised high-speed rail line.

But the war on encampments is proceeding with a shocking speed, a real blitzkrieg. This summer Gov. Gavin Newsom, known more for issuing plans than following through on them, didn’t merely order state agencies to take down encampments on land they control. He donned gloves and work clothes to throw away the tents and trash of the unhoused himself.

Newsom also issued guidance on removing encampments to cities and counties. Local governments usually do their best to ignore state orders, but not this time. Cities from Arcata to Vista have ripped down encampments with alacrity and vigor. CalMatters counted at least 14 cities, from San Francisco to Long Beach, that have either passed new laws to prohibit camping or updated old ones; at least four cities revived camping bans they previously didn’t enforce.

San Diego, a leader in the anti-encampment war, has made “No Camping” signs as ubiquitous as fish tacos and shut down the massive “island” encampment—surrounded by water—under the I-5 freeway. Meanwhile, once-progressive paradise Santa Monica toughened its anti-camping ordinance, too. Possession of cannabis may be legal, but possession of pillows and blankets can get you locked up. (Don’t let the grown-ups see your blankie, kids!)

One great thing about the anti-encampment war is that it’s unifying, an example of the enduring power of bipartisan consensus. Sure, California’s exclusively Democratic leaders have fought bitterly against the U.S. Supreme Court when it strips away gun laws or the rights of women or immigrants. But in this war, the Golden State’s top progressive leaders are making common cause with the six conservative justices and their recent decision to allow cities to prohibit people from sleeping on the streets.

As Republicans and Democrats join forces in favor of this righteous war, a few apologists for the status quo remain. Some dead-end liberals are prone to quoting the 1894 novel Red Lily, by the Frenchman Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

But France is easily dismissed these days. He was a practitioner of irony—which has been outlawed across this formerly self-aware country—and of critical and independent journalism—which is being killed off by the bipartisan consensus that we shouldn’t have to listen to uncomfortable truths that offend our partisan biases.

Now, you might think California’s intellectuals would challenge the encampment bans. Instead, our state’s scholars are leading their own anti-encampment campaign.

The University of California and California State University systems have announced strict new bans against encampments anywhere on their campuses or properties. Their goal is to prevent a recurrence of the protests of the previous academic year that produced antisemitism, Islamophobia, and violence—including when some universities called in the police to bust up the encampments.

In announcing this oh-so-principled policy, the universities are not just saying that opposition to the scourge of encampments is more important than the First Amendment. They are also eliminating a potential on-campus housing solution—tents—when thousands of their students are unhoused.

But ignore the lonely critics out there. The logic of the universities, and the state and its cities, and the nation’s highest court, is inarguable:

Californians shouldn’t have to sleep outside.

The only way to make sure we don’t have to sleep outside is to arrest or relocate those of us who sleep outside.

And such enforcement will solve the problem because someone else, under intolerable pressure, will step in and provide shelter to those displaced by encampment crackdowns.

Who is that someone? The state points to local governments, which have money and authority to build housing. The local governments point back to the state, which could change laws that make it too easy for opponents to block housing for the unhoused.

Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll sort it out soon. Please don’t lose any sleep over it.

The post California’s Greatest Scourge? Camping appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During a Santa Clara City Council meeting last year, Councilmember Kevin Park gestured to a local business owner in the audience and started reading aloud from the illustrated book All My Friends Are Dead, about a dinosaur who’s still around, even though the other dinosaurs are extinct.

But Park altered the text to read “All My Friends Are Termed Out.” The message was menacing. The business owner was deeply engaged with the city and once had many allies on the council. But Park was reminding this man that Park and the current council majority disliked him and that his political allies had left, or would soon leave, the council. Park’s implied threat: Who would protect the business owner moving forward?

Conflict is all too common at city council meetings in California and elsewhere. The council in our state’s largest city, Los Angeles, was so discredited by federal corruption investigations and a racist tape that your columnist suggested that it be disbanded. But it may be hard to top Santa Clara’s council for its rudeness and incompetence.

That, at least, is the conclusion of an extraordinary public document on the council, produced in June by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury, which includes an account of Park’s dramatic reading. In California, such grand juries of regular citizens convene for a year to investigate local government. The Santa Clara grand jury’s report, titled “Irreconcilable Differences,” offers dozens of examples of just how nasty things can get in our city halls.

This report, based on more than 40 interviews and reviews of four years of council meetings, finds that “several Councilmembers have turned public meetings into spectacles by displaying abusive and belittling behavior from the dais towards members of the public; by political grandstanding, pontificating, and digressing from City business; by exhibiting a serious misunderstanding of parliamentary procedures; and by performing outlandish antics, such as reading from a satirical cartoon book.”

Much of this nasty political football is the product of actual football. The San Francisco 49ers relocated to a new home stadium in Santa Clara in 2014. Hopes were high that the team would boost the finances and spirits of this city of approximately 129,000.

Instead, the 49ers, while winning on the field, have been the local franchise from hell, angering many city residents and officials. The stadium is an uninspiring and undistinguished venue. The team’s promises that the building would be paid for privately proved untrue; the project required a new hotel tax and a public entity to take on about $600 million in construction loans. There have also been disputes about traffic, a local soccer field that the 49ers used for parking, and the team’s financial disclosures to the city.

The 49ers responded to fierce local criticism first with litigation, then by spending millions to unseat councilmembers who didn’t toe the line. The 49ers came to control a council majority that is known locally as the “49er Five.” But the team’s power in City Hall has poisoned relationships between the council and community members, city staff, and the mayor, who remains a critic of the team.

The new grand jury report is only the latest documentation of the awful dynamic. Two years previously, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released a report, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” criticizing the council’s “lack of transparency, unethical behavior, and a lack of fiduciary responsibility regarding the Stadium.” Back then, the jury identified “repeated instances of councilmembers behaving acrimoniously and disrespectfully toward each other, City staff and the public… causing severe dysfunction in the City governance.”

Typically, when a county grand jury issues a report about a city, a city council will respond substantively, accepting some criticism and pushing back on others. But the Santa Clara City Council rejected the findings in their entirety and attacked the 2022 grand jury in conspiratorial tones. They ignored constructive suggestions, like creating a strong ethics committee to oversee the council (there is an ethics committee now, but the report says it is toothless).

One pro-49ers councilmember, Anthony Becker, reportedly leaked the grand jury report to the 49ers before its release. In 2023, Becker was indicted for the leak and lying about it; the case is still pending.

Since then, the council’s behavior has gotten worse, the 2024 grand jury report found. Arguments about small things are never-ending; on one occasion, the council spent two hours arguing over whether the mayor could send a note on city letterhead. The new grand jury report claims that the council can’t follow the most basic rules of order. They ignore the gavel when the mayor tries to quiet councilmembers and move on with the agenda.

The report questions whether councilmembers actually know the basics of governance or public meetings—or ignore them. Councilmember Park regularly speaks about items not on the agenda and interrupts votes by speaking after the closing of discussion. Councilmember Becker, who has remained in office even as he is prosecuted, makes motions before agenda items have been discussed or deliberated. And Councilmember Raj Chahal abstains from votes without legal basis, the report says

The councilmembers spend so much time fighting and snickering that they seem confused about the actual business. In an August 2022 meeting depicted by the grand jury, city staff presented councilmembers with four options for replacing a collapsed concrete wall that had been damaged by city trees. Staff had spent a year meeting with residents to come up with the plans. But the council, even after hours of briefing and discussion, was too confused to choose an option. With no path forward, the city manager and city attorney at the time instructed residents to file a claim against the city; the eventual settlement cost more than options negotiated by city staff.

Polls show the public has soured on the council and the city. And with good reason. While Santa Clara’s budget goes into deficit and its infrastructure languishes (the city is decades behind on capital improvements and a swim center was closed for safety reasons), the council is consumed by argument. A favorite tactic of the 49er Five, and their critics, is to investigate each other by filing Public Records Act requests, seeking records of their opponents’ conversations and communications. In this paper war, the city has received as many as 90 public record requests in one day, the grand jury found.

Councilmembers hurled unfounded accusations at the police chief and his family, then asked voters to change the position, currently elected, to a council-appointed post. Last year, voters rejected the change, choosing the chief over the council.

The grand jury blames the constant council conflict for long and exhausting meetings that extend well past midnight, low morale among city employees, and the discouragement of volunteerism and public participation among the general public. Its reports recommend that councilmembers attend trainings and establish an independent ethics commission.

Some councilmembers have suggested the grand jury findings are political, or aimed at the 49ers. But the council has said it will respond to the report by September 10.

Will they change their behavior? Don’t hold your breath. Indeed, the most damning of the new report’s findings is its recitation of all the residents who have asked the council to examine its own behavior and work to rebuild trust.

The council ignores these requests, the grand jury report found.

“Under current rules,” says the report, “Councilmembers have the sole authority to examine and police their behavior, a task they have proven themselves unwilling to do.”

The post Is This the Most Dysfunctional City Council in California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No man is happy but by comparison.

– Thomas Shadwell, poet laureate, United Kingdom (1689-1692)

If you want to better understand the true nature of a proposal, consider a counterproposal.

Looking at two competing proposals forces you to reckon with the different details of each idea.

Which is why every proposition on the California ballot should have a counterproposal listed next to it.

I raise this idea now because of a nasty fight in the State Capitol that made headlines earlier this summer. The fight was over a November ballot initiative and a possible counter to it from the legislature.

The initiative is a proposed repeal of the 2014 criminal justice reform measure known as Prop 47, which reduced penalties for crimes. This new initiative, now labeled Prop 36 on the November ballot, would increase penalties for certain drug crimes and thefts, as well as for criminal activities involving fentanyl. Prosecutors, county sheriffs, Republicans, major retailers, and the mayor of San Francisco are among its backers.

State Democratic leaders opposed the measure as a return to failed tough-on-crime policies. But they also knew that profound concerns about retail thefts and fentanyl meant the measure might well pass.

So, they sought to sabotage the initiative, by offering both an alternative ballot measure and a package of 14 bills that would achieve some of the goals of the initiative. The tactic backfired, causing a political firestorm instead.

The details of the controversy are complicated, so here’s the short version. Democrats included popular provisions in their bills that would be canceled if the law enforcement-backed measure were approved by voters and took effect. These provisions seemed designed not just to undermine the competing initiative but to add to voter confusion. The Democrats also gave their countermeasure some advantages, like a better ballot position.

This gamesmanship undercut the Democrats. Party leaders were criticized for appearing less interested in working toward an effective compromise to curb fentanyl and retail theft, and more interested in getting rid of a tougher-on-crime initiative that might boost turnout among Republicans in November.

In the end, with Democrats facing accusations of “election interference” from the media and Republicans, Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped the countermeasure.

Which was too bad. Voters would have benefited from a clear choice.

The controversy exposed a basic problem with California’s direct democracy. There is no fair, established, and voter-centered process for putting countermeasures on the ballot.

But it would be easy to put one in place.

Some countries with direct democracy have just such an established process for encouraging counterproposals. Switzerland, which has a ballot initiative system that inspired the establishment of California’s system 113 years ago, has the best.

The process is straightforward. When citizens or initiative groups have enough signatures to qualify an initiative, the legislative body gets to examine the initiative and negotiate with sponsors on a compromise that would obviate the need for the measure.

California established a similar process in 2014. It includes a 30-day period for public comments, and legislative hearings on measures once initiative sponsors have gathered 25 percent of the signatures necessary for ballot qualification. This has created new space for compromise between initiative proponents and state lawmakers.  The proponents can now amend their initiatives, or even remove them from the ballot, if they reach an agreement with the legislature and governor.

If those negotiations fail, as they often do, the proponents go forward with their initiative. In response, the legislature can use its power to put its own measure—a countermeasure—on the ballot.

The difference between Switzerland and California is that California has no clear rules that govern these countermeasures. As a result, California countermeasures can be presented on ballots in ways that are haphazard or unfair (with the legislative measure having a more favorable title or position on the ballot, for instance). The measures aren’t linked together on the ballot, which confuses voters. (Have you recently been confounded by two measures on different parts of your ballot seemingly aimed at reforming dialysis clinics, or combating homelessness?)

The Swiss have a standard process for countermeasures that is fair. Each countermeasure is clearly labeled as such, and placed on the ballot right next to the initiative to which it responds. If California adopted this process, countermeasures would be labeled with the same proposition number as the initiative (the initiative might be 24A, and the countermeasure 24B), and with language that made clear that the measures were competing proposals on the same subject.

No gamesmanship.

In a Swiss-style process, California voters would have three questions to answer on each initiative. Yes or no on the initiative. Yes or no on the countermeasure. And then a third choice: if both of these measures pass, which one do you want to go into effect?

The benefits of such a three-part question would be obvious. Voters would have more clarity about their choices—and more power, regardless of whether their preferred outcome wins or loses. Even voters who oppose both the initiative and the countermeasure would be able to register a preference for the one they object to least. Ultimately, voting results would more closely match voter preferences.

I’ve spent considerable time observing Swiss votes on initiatives and referenda, and there’s another advantage to this three-question system. It produces better, more informative campaigns.

Right now, we California voters consider each initiative separately in the vacuum. We learn few details of the measures. Instead, we often vote based on our feelings about an issue, or by following the endorsements in a partisan voter guide.

A Swiss-style comparative campaign—where voters must choose between an initiative and counterproposal—forces voters, and the media, to delve into the details of the two measures. Because the natural question to ask of competing measures is: What is the difference between them? Answering that question requires looking at the actual language and policy detail.

Californians won’t have that option this November. Instead, their choices will be one measure, Prop 36, that proposes harder-line solutions to drug and theft problems—or maintaining the status quo.

The proposed Democratic bills and countermeasure, now abandoned, weren’t much better. But a transparent process would have allowed legislators to draft a better countermeasure, knowing it would go on the ballot right next to the initiative. Or to negotiate in better faith with the initiative sponsors.

Either way, a clear and fair process would have produced more choices for voters, and likely better public policy.

So, let’s give the people a counterproposal now.

The post California’s Ballot Measures Don’t Need to Be a Hot Mess appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve worked in the fields of the Salinas Valley since I was 18, tending grapes and picking broccoli.

Agricultural work has many contradictions. It is both steady and uncertain. I work constantly but don’t have one job. Instead, I work different jobs for different contractors during the picking season.

I could not have survived without doing this work, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it. Farmwork is getting easier in some ways, and harder in others.

I immigrated here from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 18 to find work and help support my large family. I had relatives in the Salinas Valley, and not long after I arrived, I met my husband, a Jalisco boy who also works in the fields. We had the first of our three children when I was 19 and soon settled in the small city of Greenfield, on U.S. 101, about 40 minutes south of Salinas.

When the kids were young, I tried to work less, skipping some seasons. But we needed the money, which meant more time away from them. Sometimes I found myself working 14 hours a day, six days a week—and getting paid not hourly, but by the box. I remember making just $1 for each box of broccoli I gathered and packed.

The work came with physical costs. I’d have pain in my back and neck and right arm. When I began working with grapes, I found, as most workers do, that I had to pull so hard on the grapevines that I would sometimes fall on my back. The pain could make it hard to sleep. Jorge is good at giving massages, but that isn’t always enough.

It was easy to get sick, especially since the companies didn’t provide gear for working in the wind and in the rain. I’d sometimes get nausea and headaches from the herbicides and insecticides. I believe that my work, including exposure to chemicals, contributed to the complications I experienced in my last pregnancy and to the health and development challenges of my youngest child.

Getting care for injuries and illness has always been very difficult. Companies didn’t offer sick days or leave days to go to the doctor or clinic if you were sick or hurt. And getting the right treatment might mean a trip up to Salinas.

Also, there were no medical benefits or healthcare coverage. My children, as native-born Americans, have always had their healthcare covered under Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. But as an undocumented worker, I was not eligible for Medi-Cal. When I had to have a gallbladder operation, we were stuck with a hospital bill for $24,000 that we can’t pay.

Some, but not all, of these working conditions have improved in recent years, because of changes in the state laws and regulations for farmworkers.

The laws now require that we be paid hourly. With the higher state minimum wage, I make $16.50 per hour. We also get paid sick leave—at first, it was three days a year, but last fall, it was raised to five. And Jorge and I, like other undocumented people in California, were made eligible for Medi-Cal last year.

Our maximum hours a week are now 40. That means more time for family, for church, and for my volunteer work with Líderes Campesinas, which advocates for and organizes female farmworkers.

The trouble is that it’s often hard to get 40 hours of work these days. Sometimes I get 30 hours or less.

Together, my husband and I now earn $43,000 a year. That’s more than before. But the cost of living in California rises faster than our wages. We can’t come close to buying our home here in Monterey County, where even small houses cost $600,000 or more. And renting a three-bedroom house in Greenfield can cost $3,000 or more a month.

When all three children lived at home, we paid $2,800 to rent a three-bedroom. Now that our kids are growing up and moving out, we have a smaller place with two bedrooms for $1,600 a month.

You may have read about agricultural companies providing housing for workers. But that housing is almost always for guest workers who come here from Mexico or other countries under visas, stay for a few weeks or months, and then go home. I’ve never received any housing support.

Despite all these challenges, our lives have been blessed. I’ve always made enough money to send $200 to $300 a month to my mother. And we are so very proud of our three children.

Our older son, 26, graduated from Fresno State and is working in Monterey. Our 20-year-old daughter is entering her junior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Our 17-year-old son, soon to be a high school senior, is raising a prize pig that he will sell to help pay for college next year.

But we also feel frustrated at the obstacles to a better future.

My husband I have both tried to go to school. I’ve long wanted to become a teacher and work in early childhood education. I’ve taken some community college classes and even did some training. But I haven’t been able to finish a degree or get a job—because I’m undocumented. My husband, who wants to be an electrician, faces the same barriers.

The biggest thing this country could do for us would be to legalize our immigration status.

We have been living here, and paying taxes, our entire adult lives. We should be like anyone else—able to train for better jobs, collect unemployment when we lose our jobs, buy life insurance and better health insurance, and find a house that we can purchase.

Perhaps, someday soon, all of that will be possible.

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Don’t worry, America.

We got this.

By “we,” I mean California.

By “this,” I mean this presidential election.

And by “got,” I mean that we are sending you the best possible candidate to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.

Now let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Harris’ sentences are sometimes as awkward as Joe Biden’s. She has a bad habit of fusing her talking points into word salads.

We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack a joke when she shouldn’t or make a mistake in a meeting or at the border that requires political clean-up.

What we are giving you is our most enduring political escape artist. We are giving you someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations.

But, most of all, we are giving you someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could, and never quit.

The best way to understand Kamala Harris, if you care to understand the person who (non-Trumpian God willing) will be our next president, is through a classic movie quote, courtesy of a prominent San Francisco political consultant named Eric Jaye.

The movie is The Shawshank Redemption, released in 1994 and based on a Stephen King novella that owes a debt to the French writer Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic story about a prison break and unexpected revenge.

Years ago, Jaye suggested Kamala Harris was the California equivalent of the movie’s main character, Andy Dufresne, a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe.

“Andy Dufresne,” Jaye said, quoting Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.

Contrary to the stereotypes, 21st-century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, crazily competitive place where everything is a struggle. It’s next to impossible to get into the school you want, or get a job that pays enough, or find an affordable place to live.

The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she grew up in a tough place and time—the madness of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley and in Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. Her parents were scholars—not the toughest of professions—but they were immigrants, from India and Jamaica, who experienced tough adjustments to American life. And after their divorce, when Harris was still very young, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother.

As a mixed-race kid, Harris struggled to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both a Hindu temple and the 23rd Avenue Church of God. In her early teens, she was relocated to a foreign city, Montreal. She attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League like that supposed working-class hero JD Vance but at the UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. And she worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases—sex crimes and child abuse—that can harden people.

She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco, which forged many of our state’s toughest pols—Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Phil and John Burton. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, was one she should have lost, because it was the trickiest challenge in politics—beating an incumbent who was also her boss. Somehow, she escaped with victory in a three-way race when she’d started in third.

Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general—against a popular Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted three weeks later, she had squeaked through.

When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early and managed to scare off other contenders and win the seat over another Democrat.

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She started strong in debates but didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses, alienating both progressives and moderates. But even after that embarrassing campaign, she found a way through, convincing Biden to make her vice president.

Media and public reviews of her vice presidency have been dicey. She had too much staff turnover. Biden gave her impossible issues to manage, mainly immigration. For the first three years, her approval ratings and polling were lower than the president’s. She was cited as the reason he couldn’t retire after one term. But all those things turned. Her performance improved. And now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her for president because she looks like the stronger candidate.

She doesn’t have the nomination yet of course. She may have to go through a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.

Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now-imprisoned Trump advisor Steve Bannon has famously said, “is to flood the zone with shit.”

But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the BS of San Francisco and California and national politics. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.

She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of you-know-what.

Which is why this is her moment.

Who is better equipped to navigate us through all the crap, and to the cleaner other side, than Kamala Devi Harris?

The post California Has Got This, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you’re ever inside the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale and hear laughter ringing through the hallways, it’s probably me visiting the tomb of Culbert Olson.

Olson is perhaps the most anomalous figure in California political history. During our long era of Republican dominance (1896-1958), he was the only Democrat to serve as governor. And he was an unapologetic atheist in our god-crazy country, refusing to say “So help me God” while taking the oath of office in 1939. After an ineffective four-year term and re-election defeat at the hands of Earl Warren, he went on to run United Secularists of America.

In this century, Olson is an unknown, forgotten by all but the kookiest connoisseurs of Californiana, like your columnist, who cracks up every time he encounters our late, great god-denying governor in that cathedral-like mausoleum, just steps from a stained-glass reproduction of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This state is a bottomless lavabo bowl of contradictions.

Culbert Olson is almost never quoted, much less invoked, by powerful Californians today.

Which is what made Gov. Gavin Newsom’s June 25 State of the State speech shocking for those few of us who know Olson’s story.

Newsom started his speech by invoking Olson’s January 2, 1939 inaugural address—a document that not even I had read previously—and its opening call for California to stand up “in the face of ‘the destruction of democracy.’” Back then, with Europe sliding into war, Olson said:

As we witness destruction of democracy elsewhere in the world, accompanied by denial of civil liberties and inhuman persecutions, under the rule of despots and dictators, so extreme as to shock the moral sense of mankind, it seems appropriate that we Californians, on this occasion, should announce to the world that despotism shall not take root in our State; that the preservation of our American civil liberties and democratic institutions shall be the first duty and firm determination of our government.

Confronted by economic and social crisis, are we going to move forward toward the destiny of true democracy, or slide backward toward the abyss of regimented dictatorship?

Though he only directly quoted one Olson line, Newsom noted that in 2024 we face the same choice. Newsom continued:

The California way of life is under attack. For conservatives and delusional California bashers, their success depends on our failure. They want to impeach the very things that have made us successful, as a tactic to turn America toward a darker future.

Then Newsom pivoted to a more familiar speech, including blasts at Republicans, and long lists of progressive policies.

What Newsom didn’t mention—or, more likely, didn’t know—is that Culbert Olson is a very good model of how not to behave when democracy is under attack. Newsom isn’t an Olson clone. He is Catholic, for starters. But he has enough in common with Olson—each was the most progressive governor of his respective era—that he might reflect on this particular predecessor’s failures.

Olson won the governorship because he had the good fortune to run against the corrupt incumbent Frank Merriam. But his luck ran out there.

In retrospect, Olson appears cursed, almost as if a higher power were punishing him. Four days after Olson gave that inaugural speech, he collapsed, from a heart ailment. Three months later, his wife Kate Olson died at 56. She remains the only California First Lady to die in office.

Olson not only had a massive agenda (including public pensions, universal healthcare, and government takeover of the utilities), he was unusually strident in pursuing it. Like Newsom, he had a taste for public feuds. Where Newsom targets Fox News, Olson battled William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire. Newsom has usually been wise enough to make enemies of non-Californian politicians (like red state governors). But Olson got into local fights that frustrated his agenda, battling Republican and conservative Democratic legislators, and the Catholic archbishops in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Olson, like Newsom, was criticized for pursuing too much. That 1939 inaugural speech resembles a Newsom speech in stating way too many progressive ambitions to accomplish. Olson’s many legislative enemies in both parties blocked almost all of his broad agenda. Newsom, instead, often finds his grand ambitions foiled by mismanagement and a complicated and restrictive state governing system.

Newsom, like Olson, has made warnings about democratic decline a major talking point. What should be sobering for him is Olson’s utter failure to protect liberties and democratic practice.

Notably, when World War II came, the governor failed to defend civil liberties—most obviously, with the incarceration of Californians of Japanese heritage.

Olson knew this was wrong and warned against it publicly. He wrote his confidant President Roosevelt, asking him to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, and lobbied General John DeWitt against forced relocation and incarceration. But when DeWitt imposed the policy, Olson, as governor, stopped fighting and embraced it.

Similarly, Newsom, after years of pursuing pro-immigrant policies, has recently bowed to the political winds and President Biden’s rights-violating restrictions on immigration and asylum seekers, which mirror Trump’s policies.

Olson’s rhetoric about democracy did very little—and ultimately may have caused harm when he didn’t back it up with action. We are learning this lesson again now. When elected officials claim they are defending democracy—as Newsom and Democrats do most loudly—they make democracy look like just another talking point or political issue. When elected officials issue warnings, they spread not hope but fear, and fear is an ally of authoritarians and dictators.

Purity, progressivism, and strong faith (or Olson’s strong lack of faith) are not nearly as convincing as affection and hope. Political rhetoric that taps our fears doesn’t encourage democracy nearly as much as the hard work of building solidarity and compromise with our political opponents.

And nothing is healthier for democracy than ensuring that everyday people have the power to make decisions for themselves. In other words, keeping our democracy is not up to our governors, but to the people.

Heaven help us.

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