“It’s 4 a.m.!” My oldest son awoke to that exclamation one day last week as we rushed to get him to his school for a pre-dawn start to a music field trip. First they traveled to Los Angeles where he and his fellow jazz band members recorded a short album at a famed studio. Then it was off to Hollywood for a musical tour and then later to a workshop conducted by a famous area jazz icon.

“Only in America!” We’ve gotten used to saying that over the years as we’ve taken advantage of the wonderful blessings that residing in this land has offered. Where else in this world can a teenage boy soak up such spectacular experiences and be afforded such unique opportunities for growth and development than California? Tourists are often regaled with the state’s colonial history when in the 1700s the first Spanish missionaries set foot on its soil sampling the bounty of Las California, as it was named by the viceroyalty of New Spain. The conclusion of the Mexican-American war brought territorial recognition in 1848. A year or so later miners struck gold and a bevy of settlers forged new lives by traveling west in search of fortune. In 1850 California became the 31st state, and is now the third largest behind Alaska and Texas. Boasting millions of acres of farmland, California is home to famous institutions and landmarks such as Yosemite National Park, Mojave Desert, Alcatraz, Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyland and Hollywood.

During his trip to the United States in the summer of 1929, Winston Churchill traveled west to sample its sights and sounds. The whirlwind trip took him to Crescent City, Eureka, the Redwoods, Sacramento, San Francisco, Hearst Castle, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Hollywood. In his book Churchill and America, Martin Gilbert republishes a letter written by Winston to his wife, Clementine, in which he told her, “You motor 10 miles to luncheon in one direction and 10 miles to dinner in another. The streets by night are ablaze with electric lights and moving signs of every color. A carnival in fairyland.”

Eighty-two years on from Churchill’s visit, California is a very different place. Yet in many ways it has become even more of “a carnival in fairyland.” Throughout the 1970s, California ranked seventh among the world’s economies. From 1984 to ’85 it ranked as high as fifth. The year 2000 saw the state push ahead of Italy to number six, but it fell back one spot in 2002 when it was overtaken by China. Then in 2003 California was shoved back one more spot by Italy. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Commerce calculated this state’s gross domestic product at $1.89 trillion, which kept it in eighth place ahead of Brazil and Spain. According to EconPost, California is still the only U.S. state ranking among the top 10 economies of the world.

California feeds a nation. Its farmers account for more than half of all fruits, nuts and vegetables served on American tables. It leads the nation in agri-exports, shipping more than $6.5 billion in food and agricultural products around the world. The state grows more than 350 commodities, including all of the country’s almonds, artichokes, brussels sprout, dates, dried plums, figs, kiwifruit, strawberries, nectarines, tomatoes, olives, pistachios and walnuts. Billion-dollar commodities include milk and cream, grapes, nursery products and lettuce, along with cattle, flowers, foliage and hay. California has remained America’s number one agri-state since 1948 and lays claim to eight of America’s top 10 agricultural counties. Behind this, though, is the reality of over 3 million illegal immigrants currently in California and the reported $9 billion they cost taxpayers. Many of the state’s illegal immigrants work in the agricultural sector and, as such, enforcement of immigration law would in fact work to decimate the labor sector that largely keeps the nation’s bellies full.

Judging by these statistics, it would appear that California has a rosy future. Don’t you believe it! In 2011, California is in deep trouble. With a population of over 37.5 million, the state is in fact becoming rapidly unsustainable. These are the financial facts according to US Debt Clock.org:

It was once known as the Golden State with its abundance, its Gold Coast and gold rush days. That all now seems but a fairy tale in “a carnival in fairyland” as the state spends billions it does not have.

There is a saying here in the U.S., “As goes California, so goes the nation.” One is left asking the question that our editor in chief answered in an article titled “Is California Under a Curse?” Whether you know it or not, God declares in Bible prophecy to California and to all English-speaking peoples of the Earth that they are reaping the bitter fruits for sowing sin. “But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed [shall be] the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou go out” (Deuteronomy 28:15-19).

California openly and unashamedly declares its lawlessness and irresponsibility to the nation and the world. Already this year has seen former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger embroiled in a bitter divorce scandal involving an extramarital affair. His wife, related to the famed Kennedy family, has now hired a private investigator to seek out other examples of alleged extramarital affairs in which the political and Hollywood star may have been involved. In Schwarzenegger’s place sits current Gov. Jerry Brown, who also previously led the state from 1975 to 1983.

Brown has taken over a state that is in a very different condition to that which he led three decades ago. He currently battles Sacramento lawmakers in an effort to reduce the state’s debt and its headlong rush into fiscal insolvency. In addition, the U.S. District Court’s Ninth Circuit has ruled that the state’s prison population must be cut by 33,630 hard on the heels of a recent cost-cutting law decreeing that prisoners convicted of crimes deemed “non-serious, nonviolent and nonsexual” must be released from county jails. One can but imagine the negative impact on Californian society.

All this largely in an effort to urgently address the state’s $9.6 billion budget shortfall.

Even Major League Baseball was forced to intervene and take over management of the famous LA Dodgers team as its owner and his wife became mired in a bitter divorce which threatens the financial stability of the franchise.

Only last year, a San Francisco judge overturned Proposition 8 and declared same-sex “marriage” constitutional and homosexual marriage legal.

Adding to its tainted, perverse “fairy tale,” Hollywood produces scandal after scandal as actors, directors and producers battle on and off the screen with their sex, alcohol and drug addictions.

Amid this backdrop of a deepening financial abyss, rampant sexual scandals, accelerating crime wave, immigration crisis and a litany of other horrendous governmental, social, economic and moral issues, California struggles to breath what will, inevitably, soon become its final gasps, in the winter of its life.

“Dad, I had no idea just how dirty, dangerous and decrepit Hollywood is. I figure it used to be beautiful once,” said my son as I picked him up later that evening from his musical field trip. He recounted sights and sounds of his one-day trip with accounts of seeing the homeless, homosexual, lesbian, alcoholic, gangster and drug-soaked detritus of the city, blatantly declaring their sin as Sodom, as the prophet wrote of these times in Isaiah 3:9.

Musically, being an avid trumpeter, my son had a wonderful day full of privilege and opportunity. However, the impact on him of viewing evidence of the progressive demise of 37 million people attached to the eighth-largest economy in the world was undeniable. California truly is a perverse “carnival in fairyland.” The answers to its most pressing problems and search for enduring happiness cannot be found in the fairy’s fables of its famously escapist Disneyland. They rest alone in God’s eternal word of truth (John 17:17).

Before bed that night my son picked up from his bookcase a book that provided the answers to his fresh observations and searching questions. It contains revelatory truth that will explain the reasons for what he saw on the streets of Hollywood, and the solution to not only California’s, but the whole world’s problems. It’s titled The United States and Britain in Prophecy. That lad is but one of over 6 million others who have reached for the same book to make sense of the current state of the Anglo-Saxon nations today. Read it. It will not only help you grasp the reality behind the descent of the English-speaking peoples today, it will give you firm hope for their future!