That has become the war cry of our time. Secession is definitely in the air. Everywhere you turn somebody wants out.
Malibu and Calabasas seceded 10 years ago. Now the San Fernando Valley is ready to say adios L.A.
San Pedro wants to leave and take their harbor with them. Venice and West Los Angeles are rumbling, and no one is sure who will be next.
It’s not just us. Staten Island wants to quit New York, the Kashmir wants out of India and the Kurds want to dump Iraq.
It seems like no one is happy where they are or whom they’re with.
The problem the southern states had is they were just 150 years too early.
If these states walked into the U.S. Senate tomorrow and said we’re leaving, and not only that, we’re taking Strom Thurman, Jessie Helms and Trent Lott with us, would anybody be ready to go to war to save the Union?
Not a chance! Most of us would just say, where do we sign?
So what’s going on? Why is everyone quitting? What makes them think it’s going to be so much better over there than it is over here?
What it’s all about is that the world is very interconnected. That means what you do here affects them over there, and what they do there affects us over here. And in the process we lose local control, which makes people nuts.
It’s called globalization, which to most people means something about our relationships with countries far away. But it’s really a lot closer to home than that.
Our state has been globalized, our region has been globalized and our city has been globalized.
It means that as much as we’d like control of our little piece of coast called Malibu to remain in our hands, it’s really not in our hands any more.
It doesn’t mean we have no say. What it means is that we have less say than we’d like. And we share that say with a lot of other groups: the state, which includes Caltrans, State Parks, the Coastal Commission and Fish and Game; the feds, in the form of the National Park Service; the county, which has the beaches, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the air quality people; and a multitude of others. The more players there are, the bigger the table. The bigger the table, the less any individual has to say about the outcome.
It’s frustrating. We feel impotent and it makes us angry, but the truth is, there isn’t a heck of a lot we can do about it. The problems–pollution, traffic, inadequate affordable housing, lack of recreational space–are all large regional problems. They all cross political boundaries and no little entity (that’s us) within those boundaries is going to be able to call all the shots anymore.
We do try.
For example, in the late ’70s home values were skyrocketing and with that property taxes. Older people were being pushed out of their homes. So in a great statewide populist move we passed Prop. 13, which capped property taxes. It did the job. It kept property taxes under control. But it did a lot of other things also and it’s taken 20 years to see them. It transferred political power away from the cities to the state. Things like education, growth, and healthcare, are almost all in the hands of the state or the feds. That’s why cities practically kill each other over hotels (which produce an occupancy tax the cities get to keep) and big box retailers and auto dealerships, which throw off big sales taxes. Other than those things, about all we can do is try and pass bonds, which requires two-thirds of a vote and is often hard to do, or go hat in hand groveling to Sacramento. Lastly, we can try to cut deals with developers (called development deals) to try and get public amenities we need.
The world we live in today is not the world where we grew up. Just about everything has changed. For example, the movie “Pearl Harbor” was a watered-down history of the event, because more than 50 percent of the gross has to come from overseas. This means that, if necessary, history has to accommodate a globalized world. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, although I suspect it’s probably both.
I’m afraid that those who believe that secession is going to change this are doomed to disappointment. While you may be able to secede from where you are now, you simply can’t secede from the entire world.