Nineteen months ago, I wrote a column about young people leaving Sonoma County for places where housing was affordable, jobs were plentiful and the cost of living allowed time for family. (You can read the column here.)

Here was a new and different turn to the California story. For a long time, Californians couldn’t imagine anyone would leave this special place, blessed by nature and the ingenuity of the generations that arrived after World War II.

But no one guarantees prosperity if people don’t take care of their business. With neglect borne of complacency, California stopped being a place that offers the promise of success to future generations.

The Sacramento Bee today – read the story here – offers a new variation on the story of the California exodus. The paper reports young people are now moving to Oklahoma and Texas, reversing the “Dust Bowl” migration of the 1930s.

This is a familiar pattern, the story explains. In the last five years, more people left California for other states than the other way around.

Now, with state government on the verge of financial collapse, California faces new humiliations. Twenty-four billion dollars short of broke and with no idea how to reduce the shortfall, the state can’t even borrow money.

With its resources, it wouldn’t be difficult to restore the promise of California – but that won’t happen without political leaders who can return our optimism and our faith in the future. Californians are many things right now, but optimistic isn’t one of them.