It Could Happen Here

News Flash --- Dateline: Sometime in the near future:

"Good evening, fellow Americans. Tonight's top story: Divers continue to rescue hundreds of survivors of the Great Tilt. Millions more are feared lost at sea. The entire state of California is under water. More on this story as we receive news of late-breaking developments."


Now, don't you roll your eyes at me. It could happen.

Someday, 90% of the United States' population will reside inside the borders of California. It seems to be the way we're heading. Though real estate developers work overtime, painting over prices on their billboards with ever-higher and more fantastical prices, the people just keep on coming.

I see some hands: Yes, you in the "Surf Nevada" tee shirt. What is your question?

Surf Nevada boy: "Thank you, oh wise one. Why do they raise housing prices so steeply, and so often?"

Well, my little water-logged innocent; because they can.

Only a few years ago, you could buy a three bedroom house in Tumbleweed Junction for under $100,000 dollars. Such houses now sell for three or four times that amount. Where do young families come up with that much money? Who knows? Still, they keep on coming, and not just to my town and to other so-called "affordable" locations. They come to San Diego, they come to Los Angeles, they come to Orange County and many such places that are far more expensive than the "Inland Empire."

Sometimes I picture this huge flume, with people across the United States lined up at the high end, sliding down into California, achieving their dream at last. When they arrive, we give them a map of the freeways, a fish taco, and we wish them good luck. Then we laugh amongst ourselves, and sell them our hundred thousand dollar bungalows for half a million dollars. Then we move to Indiana, or North Carolina, or anywhere that a couple of hundred thousand dollars can buy you a half acre of wooded property and a house with rooms big enough for a grand piano and our fourteen display cabinets full of Orange Festival souvenir bobblehead dolls.

It doesn't matter.

When all the native and long-time Californians have moved to less expensive states, still they will come. Like locusts to the Nebraska cornfields, like lemmings to the precipice, they will come. They will slide down that slippery flume of perpetual debt into our fair state and they will need houses and schools and roads and swimming pools and SUVs. The state population will continue to swell, until the aggregate weight of several hundred million people (and their SUVs and their pool toys and their five-thousand dollar barbecue islands) is greater than what the left side of the continent can bear. As the rest of the United States will by then be populated by a mere few million ex-Californians and a few oddball holdouts, the continental land mass will begin to shift and yes, tilt, dunking what was once known as the Golden State into the cold Pacific ocean.

Oopsy! Bye-bye, San Bernardino freeway! Bye-bye, Golden State bridge! Bye-bye, Disneyland! (I hope Mickey and Minnie can swim.)

Think about that as you wend your tortuously slow way home on the blazing griddle known facetiously as the "free"way.

Or, you could just take another sip of your Frappadappachino Molte-Dulce Latte la Vente Espresso de Jelly Belly "coffee." Watch out! That jerk with the New Jersey license plates just cut you off. Wow... I never saw it done with both arms before. You'd think he'd teach his little girl better manners.