California Self Centered Softies

Are Californians really different from other Americans?  Did the five million people who moved to California in the last ten years develop different personalities from living here?  Here’s another in my reflections on the Golden State, where I moved 50 years ago this summer.  (Oh yeah, in that same decade six million people left California– why?)

“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.”  Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich included this advice in a 1997 essay parodying commencement speeches and later published in her popular book Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life.

My Wall Street exec father lived and worked in New York City most of his life and then retired to California at age 75.  He traded the IRT to Wall St to drives down Highway One to Big Sur.  His version of the Schmich quote is “My New York friends say I have mellowed since I moved to California.”

And he has.  The somewhat intense man who wore a coat and tie to Saturday afternoon pool parties gave all his ties away and asked new friends to take him to Salinas to buy a bolo tie.  He had some sadness about leaving his front row subscription seat at the Metropolitan Opera, but within a year he was going to our local cineplex in his khakis to watch the Saturday Met in HD and eating a hotdog at intermission.

But has he gone soft, or even mellow?  I think that quip says more about his New York friends that it does about him.  The joke is of course that my father is anything but mellow, or if that’s mellow, his friends haven’t met Surfer Dude or Valley Girl.

What about Californians like Maxine Waters or Steve Jobs or Caesar Chavez -  they are anything but mellow or soft.  It could be just simple envy that makes folks call Californians soft – I am reminded of the disapproval Barack Obama always got when he went home to Hawaii and swam in the ocean – he shouldn’t be allowed to do that, he doesn’t deserve to do that.  I wouldn’t call that soft, I’d call it smart.

I have to admit that when I go back to New York I do get a little harder, a more aggressive pedestrian and driver, a more opinionated debater, harder.  It’s fun, for a while, yelling at cars that cut you off, pushing your way into buildings or conversations, You gotta problem with that?  But it’s exhausting, and I appreciate coming home to mellow land. 

I noticed a version of this distinction in a recent feature in the London Financial Times, whose Weekend edition always includes a description of a lunch with a famous or interesting person.  Last week it was Matthew Walker, a British expert on sleep, and professor at UC Berkeley.  The otherwise sensible Janan Ganesh, a Brit whom the FT recently assigned to cover America, meets Walker at a deli in Berkeley. “Walker’s sweep of blond hair suggests retired surfer or head stylist at a price gouging salon.  His actual job, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley could be a heartland demagogues’ cliché of West Coast employment.”  (Neuroscience is soft or self-centered Californian?  I’d say it’s one of the harder sciences.) 

Even while citing all of Walker’s research Ganesh can’t quite accept that sleep is an appropriate field of science or that Walker’s book’s Why We Sleep really deserves to be so popular.  “Popular intellectuals of this generation often converge on the operations of the brain.  Generations ago, the public boned up on history or art.  Today it is scientific knowledge of the self that is the admission to polite company.  We are all Californians now.”

So not just on the eastern seaboard, but in the UK, Californians are soft, self centered, appeal a wee bit too much to public taste and are all blond.  Try it for a while, but come back home to be hard headed and more sensible.

Maybe Schmich’s advice is good, live east and west, see the extremes, but don’t get stuck in either.  What kind of emotional being is better, a hard ass or a softie?  Neither is really a good choice.  Be hard AND soft, they are not mutually exclusive.

But I can’t leave it at that.   In the long run, if I had to choose, I’d chose soft over hard.   All the projecting and mocking of Californians as soft, touchy feely, self centered and indulgent, just seems to me to prove the insecurity of those hard folks in Eastern cities.

What’s the problem with being mellow, caring, sensitive?  If anything, I think it’s healthier.  Hawaiians lead the nation in life expectancy, California is 4^th.  My argument breaks down, however, with NY in 5^th place.  Probably has more to do with income and health care than climate or emotional IQ.  Not surprisingly the lowest ten states in life expectancy are all the southern states, where people die almost ten years younger.

Our New York President has a lot to say about Speaker Pelosi and her San Francisco values.  Nancy Pelosi - now there’s a hard Californian if I ever met one, although she studied at the knee of her hard ass Baltimore mayor father.  I miss the days when our president was from mellow Hawaii, studied and smoked dope at Southern California Occidental.  Even our other California presidents Nixon and Reagan seem mellow compared to our New York hard baller.

Probably the best path is somewhere in the middle.  But please don’t make me live somewhere in the middle of our nation.  It’s either hard or soft coasts for me.

Copyright © 2019 Deborah Streeter