I woke up today to find that "The future's Orange County". Heralding this prediction was no self-promoting local rag whose name I won't mention, but rather the Guardian UK. Nearly three million people, yet no public hospitals or law schools to serve them. Billions on toll roads, not one cent for affordable housing. Countless gated "neighborhoods", but no downtown. Yes, if privatization, segregation, and alienation figure in our national destiny, then OC is the future.

But fortunately, the Guardian was not talking about OC, but "The OC", a show about which I have many good things to say. Is the drama flamboyant and hyperbolic? Sure. But if only the exaggerations are true, as Adorno once said of psychoanalysis, then much rings true about the OC. Especially the greed, insecurity, insincerity, hypocrisy - well I could go on. And I will.

But there's a lot behind the "Orange Curtain" to incite those sins. Beauty. Wealth. Sunshine. Space. Promise. My family moved here almost 28 years ago, and it's been the landscape for our American Dream. I've seen it change too much not to miss what "progress" and "planning" have destroyed, and not to cherish what is still left, and not to praise what it still could be. For better or worse, Orange County is my community. It does not belong to the John Birch Society, or Donald Bren, or the despotic homeowner's associations, or to the ironically named freedom.com. They don't own it, as long as we tell our experience and share our vision of how things ought to be.

OC belongs to all of us - to strive, to speak, to fight, and to resist.