A huge percentage of the people in California are from other nations, around a third of our people here in California are immigrants. So a lot of the people here do not have ancestors who went through the Great Depression here in California, etc.
We have some brilliant new immigrants, including new doctors who are immigrants, but their histories may be different than the history of California, for instance they may have experienced the civil war in Nicaragua between the Sandinistas and the Contras, or the civil war in El Slavador, or they may remember the Japanese invading the Philippines during World War II, etc. Or maybe they remember the FARC and the ELN in Colombia and the AUC, etc. We are a part of world history here, we have people from all over the world.
But, many of our new immigrants do not understand that Trump is not a real Republican because they do not remember Reagan, and they do not remember how much Reagan loved the Mexicans, and they do not remember when Reagan made all of our immigrants legal so that they could join labor unions and so that they could call the police in the case of an emergency, etc. Tommy Chong is from Canada and he became a US citizen thanks to Reagan. Pope John Paul II loved Reagan.
Many of the new people here were not here to learn all of the stuff that we learned from living here in California for generations, and many did not see how great it was here in the 1950s, and in the 1980s.
Many never saw the California Dream in action. For me the good times were from when my whole community had jobs working on the Space Shuttles, with Reagan in the White House. Van Nuys still built Chevy Camaros then, and it was always fun to cruise Van Nuys Blvd and go hang out at Balboa Park. In Lancaster people cruised Lancaster Blvd. We had drive-in movies. Heavy Metal was the music of the time when I was a teen and we rocked out and went to great concerts. We had parties with fire pits and kegs of beer in the desert. We had roller skating rinks everywhere for the kids. Out in the desert when I was a teen we did not have all of the gang bullshit, we did not have gangs, instead we had friends and neighbors, and our parties were fun like an Annette Funicello movie.
So, now we have unemployment, crime, gangs selling drugs and killing each other, we have homeless people all over the streets, and you cannot have drive-in movies like in the old days because people will bring guns and shoot each other. In the old days people used to have house parties and they would open their homes up to everyone to have a celebration, but it is not like that anymore.
And San Bernardino used to have beautiful malls and great department stores, they are all gone now. And many of the people do not remember when San Bernardino was a nice area, so they are not angry when they see what San Bernardino has become because they never saw San Bernardino when it was nice.
And police and prisons is not the answer, which is what they did, they built a prison in the middle of my hometown and they started arresting people and putting the people in the prison.
We need to build more colleges instead of prisons. And we need to get back to being the fun good people who we are at our core. Otherwise, what is life about?
Salute,
Tony V.
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