The Golden State is Rotting from the Bottom Up
While the suits in Sacramento scurry around their marble halls issuing press releases that nobody with a shovel actually reads, the real people of Wrightwood are literally digging their lives out of the muck. It is a joke. A sick, expensive, taxpayer-funded joke that keeps playing on repeat every single time a cloud dares to drop a little water on the Golden State (which, let’s be honest, is basically every winter). You would think with the billions—with a ‘B’, folks—that they suck out of our paychecks every year, they could figure out how to keep a mountain from sliding onto a Honda Civic, but no. We get ‘states of emergency’ instead of actual solutions because a state of emergency is just a fancy way for a politician to say ‘we screwed up, but now we get to spend your money even faster without any oversight.’ The water keeps coming down and the excuses keep piling up higher than the debris in some poor family’s living room. It’s a disgrace. People are dying.
Four weather-related deaths have already been logged, and you can bet your last dollar the bureaucrats are already drafting the paperwork to blame anything and everything except their own failure to maintain basic drainage systems. They love the term ‘atmospheric river’ because it sounds like some unstoppable cosmic force (it’s just rain, guys) that absolves them of the responsibility to build retaining walls or clear out the culverts that have been clogged since the Reagan administration. You see the photos of cars buried up to their windows and you have to wonder where the ‘world-class infrastructure’ we were promised actually went. It certainly didn’t go into the hillsides of Wrightwood. It probably went into a study about how to make sure high-speed rail tracks that will never be finished don’t hurt the feelings of local lizards. This is what happens when you prioritize vanity projects over the literal ground beneath your constituents’ feet.
The Myth of the Unforeseeable Disaster
Let’s get one thing straight: mudslides in California are as predictable as a politician lying during an election year. We know the burn scars from the summer fires are going to turn into chocolate-colored rivers of death the moment the first real storm hits. This is not some ‘black swan’ event that caught everyone off guard (except maybe the people who get paid six figures to monitor this stuff). Yet, every year, we act shocked. We act like the mud just decided to be mean this year. The reality is that the state of California has abandoned the rural and mountain communities because they don’t have the voting density of Los Angeles or San Francisco. If a mudslide hit a tech billionaire’s driveway in Palo Alto, you’d have a fleet of state-funded bulldozers there before the engine even cooled down. But for the folks in the mountains? They get a PDF warning them to ‘shelter in place’ while the mountainside prepares to eat their garage. It’s a total abandonment of the social contract that we all supposedly signed.
I’m tired of hearing about ‘unprecedented’ rainfall. It’s rained before. It’ll rain again. The only thing that’s truly unprecedented is the level of smugness from the leadership that thinks a few tweets from the Governor’s office constitutes a disaster response. They want you to think this is just the ‘new normal’ so you don’t start asking where the flood control tax dollars went. They want you to look at the sky and be afraid, rather than looking at the state budget and being furious. The debris flows in Southern California are a physical manifestation of government waste. Every ton of mud that crashes through a front door is a ton of evidence that the priorities in this state are completely upside down. We are paying first-world taxes and getting third-world flood protection. If you don’t think that’s a scandal, you’re probably on the state payroll.
Bureaucracy as a Barrier to Safety
There is a specific kind of cruelty in watching families lose everything while the state of emergency declaration is used primarily as a PR tool. Does a ‘state of emergency’ stop the water? No. Does it bring back the four people who lost their lives? Not a chance. What it does is release ’emergency funds’ that usually end up in the pockets of the same contractors who failed to fix the problems in the first place. It is a closed-loop system of failure. The debris flows are lethal, fast, and heavy, yet the state’s approach is slow, lethargic, and weighed down by red tape. They spend years debating environmental impact reports for a single drainage pipe while the hillsides are actively crumbling. Nature doesn’t wait for a committee meeting. The mud doesn’t care about your three-year permitting process. We need action, not more ‘inclusive’ disaster planning sessions that focus on everything except moving the damn dirt.
Predicting the future isn’t hard when you look at the track record. The rain will stop, the mud will dry, and the politicians will go back to talking about things that don’t matter to the average person trying to pay a mortgage in a flood zone. Then, next year, the cycle will repeat. They will act surprised again. They will call it ‘historic’ again. They will ask for more money again. It’s a racket. The people of California deserve better than a government that only shows up with a siren and a body bag after the damage is already done. We need to demand that infrastructure means more than just painting lines on a road; it means actually managing the land we live on so that a rainy Christmas doesn’t turn into a funeral procession. But don’t hold your breath, because as long as we keep accepting ‘atmospheric river’ as a valid excuse for incompetence, the mud will just keep coming.
Look at Wrightwood. Look at the homes buried to the eaves. That isn’t just mud; that’s the weight of a state government that has forgotten its primary duty is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. They’ve traded safety for ideology, and now the bills—and the debris—are coming due. It’s time to stop treating these storms like freak occurrences and start treating the state’s failure as the predictable disaster it truly is. If they can’t handle a wet winter, they shouldn’t be in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone the most populous state in the union. The tragedy in Wrightwood is a wake-up call that Sacramento will undoubtedly hit the snooze button on. Again. And again. Until the next ’emergency’ provides another excuse to ignore the crumbling reality of a state that’s losing its grip on the basics of survival.
