A meadow gets paved over. A two-bedroom house with 70 years of sprawling landscaping is knocked down to make way for four, million dollar-plus drywall palaces. Trees are uprooted to make way for another lane on I-5, leaving endless families of bewildered hummingbirds homeless.
To the north, art deco buildings that once embraced the skyline are replaced by windowless, soulless, Khrushchev-era Moscow apartments. And, so it goes as the world gets a little uglier each day.
I often wonder why modern restaurants display images of Cardiff before the freeway invaded our land. There are images of fisherman rowing skiffs to shore with half a dozen 50-pound-plus white sea bass. Empty beaches, 100-buck-a-month trailers perched right on the sand. It’s difficult to contemplate paradise lost while numbing our senses on $5-a-sip margaritas.
Have we traded the perfumed gardens of Eden for the stench of Detroit? Who sold us on the idea that progress is a coast strip mall featuring cellphone-addicted meat puppets with spray-on suntans? Who tricked women into believing that they were not good enough to stand on their own two feet but needed fancy stilts that cost a mere hundred bucks and a lifetime of back pain?
North County is a God-blessed paradise and yet we treat it like a wasteland. Where are Sunshine Gardens, The Pony Lady, Miracles Cafe? Does it irk you to pay $15 a day for a strip of asphalt on public land? Your land? When that new freeway wall blocked the view of a perfect two-way peak our lives became a little less wondrous.
North County is still beautiful and so are most of its residents. Still, it is in danger of becoming a cluttered mass of strangers pounding the pavement in search of a midsummer day’s dream. In 50 years, we have gone from middle class to upper class to little class, an international tourist destination where hyperactive gawkers limit our movement.
I understand their desire to share the beauty of this place but am disappointed that we cater more to them than the locals.
We can preserve our dream world, and maybe even improve upon it. One way to do so is for good, caring people to get involved in local government. Surely there are some among you who love North County enough to run for city council or attend a meeting discussing some massive new development.
If we don’t fight back against those who hide their agendas beneath terms like “urban renewal” or “affordable housing” (affordable for whom?), we are doomed to live in whatever tiny cages they force us into.
Those of us who have enjoyed this natural paradise owe it to those who come after us to preserve it. I realize that I have not provided many answers, but I hope you have been stimulated into asking some needed questions — the biggest being what sort of town do we want to live in?
