Saratoga News
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Point of View
Wealth often has its privileges, but should it?
By Carl Heintze
There's an old Bill Mauldin cartoon that shows two Army officers standing on a mountaintop looking at a beautiful scene before them. One asks the other, "Is there one for the enlisted men, too?"
The gist of the cartoon is that rank--or in civilian life, wealth--has its privileges. It isn't fair to have some things available to the few and not to the many is what I get from the cartoon.
I thought a lot about that cartoon and its message last week because we were privileged to share a beach house on the Santa Cruz coast. Getting there involves a long story with which I won't bore you. Suffice it to say we got to share the cottage (which is larger than the house we live in) and to spend a few days in it without anyone else around.
True, there were people on the beach. They passed right and left jogging, walking their dogs or looking for shells. A few even ventured into the water. But none of them ever intruded further into our isolation.
That's because while the "cottage" is only about 200 feet from the shore of a very blue Pacific, public ownership of the beach ends 100 feet from the "cottage." There is a sign that says so. It reads "Private Property. Keep Out!" and it is precisely 100 feet from the edge of the ocean.
The occupants of the house can, of course, walk over the 100 feet of private property to reach the public beach. It doesn't work the other way around, though. Just to be sure, there is a security patrol.
The privacy is further enhanced by the fact that the "cottage" is built about 20 feet off the ground with large cement pillars to hold it aloft. In part that's because of the hazard of winter storms that can sweep up the beach to the very foundations of the cottage. But it also provides an additional barrier to public access. You'd have to be a steeplejack or a mountain climber to get up the steep walls of the house if you did cross the 100 feet of private beach.
The cottage is not alone in its grandeur. More similar places are lined up along the beach. They are there because they were all built before the California Coastal Commission was formed, and that allowed their owners to grandfather their ownership into the restrictions on building right on the ocean.
Not much of the California coast is like that, thanks to the law that created the commission, but there are other instances of private ownership up and down California.
Spending time in such a place was a new experience for us.
Not that it wasn't enjoyable. Everyone dreams of a cottage or a condo by the sea where one can go to be away from the frantic pace of the city, where there is nothing before you except the sea and the sky and where the only sound is the regular rise and fall of the surf sweeping up the shore.
We sat in the sun on a spacious deck and looked at the sea. We fell asleep to the sound of the surf rising and falling regularly, and when our visit was over we threaded our way back over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the hustle and bustle of the Santa Clara Valley.
But it was, at least on my part, with a feeling of disquiet. The Coastal Commission came along because Californians began to see that if something wasn't done, the whole coast would be bought up by private owners and access would be denied to all but a minority. On the other hand, the commission also had to deal with the problem of those like the owners of the place in which we stayed, who had in all good faith bought their land at a time when California was far less populated than it was to become. They had put money into their acquisitions and they were to put a lot more into what they owned as time passed.
The question was one of balancing property rights against the rights of everyone to have access to the nation's natural wonders. It's a question that persists.
Wealth ought not to have its privileges, especially unfair privileges, but it does. Wealth makes it possible for some, but not many, to buy the choicest properties and to live on them. Montecito, for instance, near Santa Barbara, is a lovely place to live, but it's not a location you or I can afford. Malibu Beach, the home of the stars, the rich and the famous, is another location to which access comes through wealth.
It's not fair, and it also is not fair to have places of beauty despoiled by the tramp of thousands, even millions of visitors.
And so if we gain access to them, we leave with a faint sense of guilt, and if we foul places of beauty, threatening to destroy them--as with Yosemite Valley, for instance--we feel guilty about that, too.
Is there place for the enlisted men and women of the world? Or is it open only to the generals?
Maybe and maybe not.
