by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I met a woman from Connecticut the other night at my granddaughter’s flag football game. Yes, you read that right. Welcome to the Twenty-First Century, where girls play football.

And pretty high-caliber football at that. Now, I may be just a little biased because my granddaughter was quarterbacking, but I noticed the same thing about these players that I noticed about my daughter’s softball teams a coupla decades ago: They were good, and they were having fun.

Girls’ teams don’t worry nearly as much about being “cool” as boys’ teams—and for that matter men’s teams—do. Men’s teams have gotten better about it. They used to be stone-faced after success. Guy hit a grand slam, it was like Mount Rushmore when he got to the plate: four guys staring into space like they’d been misled about the time of the eclipse. The visible excitement level was comparable to the taking of the Eucharist.

That’s changed now. It’s okay now to celebrate your success on the field; you’re allowed to smile when you succeed. You congratulate each other on small victories like advancing the runner or making a good throw, even if no one scored or was put out. It’s Mardi Gras when you score.

They learned all this from girls. Girls’ teams were celebrating success a quarter-century ago. They were high-fiving and doing fancy handshakes and dancing off the field before the turn of the century. And men watched their sisters and daughters and thought, “They’re having a lot more fun than I do (or did).” And finally, a generation has reached the big leagues that doesn’t look like they’re doing this because they failed to take out the trash and this is their punishment.

But I digress. At least I think I digress. I went down this rabbit hole before I had time to gress, so I’m not sure this qualifies as a digression.

So anyway, I was sitting at the flag football game, sweat pouring off me in rivers big enough to attract salmon, when I met this woman from Connecticut. This is her first year in California and I asked her how she liked it.¹

“It’s fine,” she said, without enthusiasm. “The kids love it. I miss the seasons, though.”

This is a common lament of recent arrivals. It is usually voiced by women. Men see no problem. We have all four seasons: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey.

What’s more, we get the East Coast ballgames at ten in the morning on weekends, so there’s absolutely no time for yardwork—unlike our East Coast brethren who have to spend all Saturday morning on the riding mower.²

They also have to stay up all night watching West Coast sporting events. “I watched the Mets play the Dodgers last night. ‘Til 1:25am. Freaking thing didn’t start until 10:30 and then it went eleven innings before that idiot manager put Strabowski in to face Martinez! Strabowski, for chrissakes. Even at one in the morning, I knew that was a bad idea.”

Nor do I understand how anyone can miss winter. Sure, snow is lovely—if you can just sit around and look at it. Snow is delightful if you’re relaxing after a day on the slopes, sipping hot chocolate, and watching the kids build a snowman. I go to Seneca Falls, New York, and Steamboat Springs, Colorado, every year to do just that.

But snow is a huge pain in the . . . back . . . if you have to shovel it at six in the morning, four days in a row, so you can get the Dodge out of the garage and then slide around like mercury on a hotplate all the way to work. For four months.

People who lament our dearth of seasons are almost never talking about the joy of sleet. They rarely say they miss the 106% humidity, and I seldom hear them rhapsodizing about ice storms or hurricanes or floods. Apparently, that hole in the ozone layer that covers this nation east of the Mississippi allows cosmic rays to damage all parts of the brain that process seasons except the parts that remember fall breezes, leaves changing color, and crocuses bursting up through the earth every March.

Besides, those of us who grew up here know we do have seasons, and they’re easily identifiable. You know it’s fall when you have to figure out whether Season 34 of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit is new or re-runs.³ Winter begins when you have to put on a sweater to play golf. Spring is when the Angels start lying about their pitching staff. And summer is when you can’t get out of your car to go into Costco because of all the people pestering you to sign their initiative petitions.

Summer is my favorite. Initiative qualifying season. I just love it when I see all those card tables set up outside Costco.

I used to make fun of these people. I used to insist they explain the initiative to me in 150 words or more. Then I’d yell at them. “Don’t you know this is exactly what they did in Denmark and the dementia rate tripled!?” “Don’t you realize you’re being duped by the Trilateral Commission? Just where do you stand on fluoridation of the orange groves? That’s what you should be out here working for!” “You should be ashamed of yourself for promoting such blatant racism, fascism, ageism, sexism, speciesism, Manichaeism” [whichever I thought would upset them most]. Then I’d tell them I couldn’t sign because I just moved here from Connecticut, I wasn’t registered, and I had a game to get to.

You can’t buy that kind of entertainment.

But time has changed my outlook. Now that I’ve seen how fragile representative democracy is, even here, I feel more empathetic about people who want to practice what Governor Hiram Johnson saw as “direct democracy.”

There will be at least ten initiatives on the ballot in November. And each of them required 546,651 signatures to get there.⁴ That’s a lot of card tables. And a lot of people who care about democracy.

I’m confident not that many card tables aren’t going up in Iowa or Alabama or Maryland. Those folks think card tables are for playing cards on.

We know better. I got a sawbuck says you can’t tell me how many statewide initiatives have appeared on the California ballot in the last forty years. Go ahead, do the math in your head. Hell, I don’t care where you do the math. Do it in your spleen, do it in your elbow if it makes you feel good. It won’t change the number.

413. In twenty election years, we’ve dealt with 413 initiatives.

At a half-million qualification signatures a pop. You wouldn’t think you could get a half-million Californians to agree that 413 issues should go on the ballot. But you’d be underestimating how badly Californians want to get in to Costco.

413 times we’ve made those decisions. There are plenty of Supreme Court justices who didn’t have to decide 413 issues in their careers. And those 413 don’t include the alphabet measures we have to figure out on a citywide or countywide basis.

They don’t always belong on the ballot. So help me, I think some of these become initiatives because their proponents couldn’t find a legislator crazy enough to introduce them to a legislative body.

Apparently, the legislature has decided they can only come up with a finite number of bad ideas—the rest are up to us. And we certainly seem up to the task.

But as the silly season winds down, and the serious season arrives in November, we need to implement good ideas. We need to demonstrate our understanding of the meaning of citizenship and the duties it includes. It’s critically important that we all get involved in the democratic process this year.

The card table people have already shown how important they think every individual’s involvement is. They’ve worked their butts off for what they believe.

Now it’s your turn. Get involved. There’s still plenty of time. You don’t even need a card table. Call a candidate’s office and ask what you can do. If you don’t like the answer, ask what else you can do. Keep asking until you’re a part of something. Even if it’s addressing postcards, it’s the most important thing you’ll do this year.

Then . . . on or before November 5 . . . vote.

BEDS NOTES

1. She didn’t seem to be perspiring as much as I was. I don’t know whether that’s because she is a member of a superior gender or whether she was used to Connecticut’s heat, which is not dry. (I’m sorry, the whole, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” thing has never worked for me. The heat may be dry but I’m soaking wet. I take clothes out of the washer that are drier than I was at that game.)
2. I spent a few days in North Carolina once. You could actually watch the grass grow. It’s slightly faster than baseball, but I found it hard to follow nonetheless.
3. “Honey, what season of SVU was it when we got married?”
4. You need 874,641 for a constitutional amendment.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.