Three Years Later Living in Southern California: My Impressions and My Own Disillusionment of Our Times

There are lots to be said of the quaint upper-class suburbia of Murrieta, Ca. where I presently reside at for the mean time. For a city it's impressive, lulling back to how Fremont, Ca. pretty much looked for awhile, with many areas under developed, but unlike Fremont - the city council has successfully limited the amount of development that would have led the city looking more like Hayward, Ca or Cupertino, Ca., leaving it in a more small town feel. Unlike other cities in the bay area - here in Southern California, cities are sprawled out into an immense expanse of land with myriads of suburbs dotting across the landscape. Leaving you to wonder what kind of industry that there had to be to have such a population exist where it does. The simple answer is really that there isn't. There is no industry or any type of niche economy that is sustaining cities like Murrieta and Temecula, California in where it is.

It is located south of the city of Riverside (far east of Los Angeles), directly west of Huntington Beach, and north of Escondido, California. It's really the median point destination between Los Angeles and San Diego within the inland. And as such, there isn't much to be had here, except for million dollar homes and the self-assured, belligerent, self-absorbed, self-entitled offspring of these well-to-do people whose money is squandered on BMWs' and Benz's for Larry Jr. and Lil' Gwen whose channeling Paris Hilton. It was only twenty years ago that this area was mostly ranches and an endless landscape expanse of grass and rolling hills, and in a short time turned into shopping malls, pristine luxury mansions, a few normal middle class homes, and a handful of apartment complexes that range from the regular mundane to elite living quarters for those well-to-do single population.

The population here is mostly of Caucasian heritage, at least according to the U.S. Census Bureau with Hispanics running along second. As you can imagine, it is mostly very "white-washed" area, with a few Protestant and Episcopalian churches here or there. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with having Caucasians around - but it doesn't really lend itself any real range of diversity alone. A good majority of the home owners of million dollar mansions are really generational inheritors of their progenitors and their forefathers before them - which would explain the million dollar homes with lack of any actual real industry within hundreds of miles save for the winery business, and horse raising and breeding. It's ever so much more apparent as if night versus day in comparison to my former lodgings in Highland, Ca. If people I the Bay Area believed that Oakland was the very worst it could get - they haven't visited San Bernardino.

It's obscenely arresting that such a disparagement in the distribution of wealth can be seen within only an hour's drive. And of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is the regional Native American run casino, Pechanga - which is twice as big and twice as packed with addicted gamblers. It is only simply thought provoking that the problems of today isn't really the loss of morals in mainstream media, the ever increasing amounts of foreigners in our borders - illegal or otherwise, or the corruption of our youth in schools being taught about condoms, or that Creationism is disregarded as pseudo-science - but it's really the ever increasing gap between rich and poor. I should attest this so, as I'm currently unemployed and making ends meet writing articles for certain websites.

The next president of the United States has something to seriously answer for - to answer for the last 8 to 20 years of Capitol Hill politics and business-as-usual partisanship. We owe to ourselves and we owe it to our future as a country. Because if this is the very best we can do - then we are seriously in trouble.