Jack of Harts

The dissolution of Old California was an unfriendly slide. California had been suffering from decades of one party rule that emptied the State treasuries and dumped most of their water reserves straight into the ocean. Crops were dying in the fields and several major cities suffered from plagues thought lost to the Dark Ages. Add a combination of natural and manmade fires burning down forests the size of other States, assorted other natural disasters, or nearly weekly stories about another manmade mass casualty event or domestic terror attack, and people were comparing California to the Biblical stories about Egypt back in the time of Moses. Leaders in the big cities looked down on the country bumpkins as too deplorably stupid, racist, and backwards to have any say in how they lived. And those outside the big cities were just plain done with being told how they were going to be allowed to live. The divorce between urban and rural districts, when it happened, was not a peaceful one. And as often happens in cases like that, the suburbanites got pulled along for the slide into chaos. It was not a fun time to be a Californian.