By Mike Nyden

There is something wrong with a state that says it celebrates diversity, but doesn’t celebrate Christmas, especially when the former is a lie.

We traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area to spend Christmas with our daughter. Her company was our gift to us.  The trip was eye opening, to say the least.

I grew up and lived in California for fifty-two years before moving to Roswell just over five years ago.  We’d had enough of the high taxes, the density, and the lunacy.  It’s worse now.

The California where I grew up was a place of orange orchards and strawberry fields.  One of my earliest memories is of the cloying scent of orange blossoms in bloom, emanating from the acres of orchards that surrounded our home.  Some enterprising Nisei kept his fields in production year around, even though he could earn enough from a single harvest of strawberries to do pretty well.  The place was trash free, and safe for kids.  Christmas was a big thing, and a manger scene was positioned beneath the giant living Christmas tree at city hall.

Things have changed.  Freeways are trash strewn, with piles of debris abutting every storm drain.  The “sound walls”, and a great many other walls, were “tagged” with various gang graffiti.  It was disturbing, because while we’d had a belly-full of California before leaving, I didn’t remember it being this bad.  Honestly, I think the whole area has decayed in only five years.

We went last minute shopping on Christmas Eve, and drove to the next town north.  Sure, the traffic was bad, but no worse than what we experience here heading to the North Point Mall, though something was different.  People played “cut and thrust” for a parking space.  There’s a southern friendliness to which I’ve become accustomed, I guess, a civility and reasonable manners, which was simply missing in my erstwhile home state.  Frankly, people driving, and shopping, were rude.

Of course, the 9.5% sales tax was pretty rude too, once we got the bill for our purchases.  Think about it for a second, think about a nearly ten percent tariff tagged on to everything you purchase, but the streets are crumbling. 

The area doesn’t go for Christmas, I can tell you that.  Now granted, we only visited two towns in Marin County, arguably among the richest counties in the United States, but there were no Christmas decorations in either town.  No, I’ll take that back.  Macy’s, the department store, had a “star” superimposed over their apostrophe.  That was the extent of any visible head-nod to the holiday.  “Is it really Christmas?” I asked rhetorically.  You sure couldn’t tell it from civic dedication.  I don’t know whether it was with knowledge, but they killed it. 

In any event, we got through the day, enjoyed our evening, and then heard about the attempted bombing on the flight to Detroit.  I figured the security for our pending flight home would be increased, despite Secretary Napolitano’s statement about the efficacy of our federal government, but what waited for us as we tried to get aboard an aircraft for home surprised me nevertheless.

 
On Monday, we headed for the security line at 7 am for a 9:15 flight.  The line extended from our terminal, past various ticketing counters, through a hallway, and into the next terminal, probably half a mile in total.  Fair enough.  If the TSA was instituting new procedures, they just planned for it badly.  If this was the idea of the airport, they planned for it badly.  I should have expected no less though, for when has government ever gotten anything right.

We got through the line with fifteen minutes to spare.  I’m sure there have been other times when I wanted to get out a place as badly as I did San Francisco, but I can’t recall another.