"Who would have thought that America's largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?"

-New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

When Sonoma County Supervisor Valerie Brown announced last week that she wants to maintain funding for the Orenda Center drug and alcohol treatment program, an auditorium full of Orenda Center supporters cheered.

Which left Brown the unhappy task of sharing a basic lesson in civics and in the cruel calculus of budget cutting.

"Don't clap," she said. "This only means that some other program will have to go . . . For every hurrah, there will be a tear shed."

No doubt many also applauded last week when they read that Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, the Santa Rosa Democrat, decried state budget cuts as tantamount to "throwing women and children off the lifeboat."

It is heartbreaking that the most vulnerable among us will be harmed by the state's belated attempts to stave off the functional equivalent of bankruptcy.

But the question needs to be asked: Where were Evans and her cheering supporters while we were digging ourselves into this hole?

This is, after all, an entirely predictable outcome. This is what happens when government agrees to long-term financial commitments that it cannot afford, when it borrows against the future year after year, and when it refuses to set aside money for hard times.

When the state ran out of money - and it was going to run out of money - the most vulnerable would suffer because it's the state's job to look after people in need.

As state and local governments scramble to escape insolvency, we will hear more heartfelt pleas in the coming days. No more taxes, people will say. No more spending cuts. Don't increase tuition. Don't reduce money for classrooms. Don't close parks. Don't curtail human services and health care. Don't lay off state and local workers. Don't- don't- don't.

But the time is coming when Californians must put aside single-issue politics and recognize our shared responsibilities - recognize that our inability to compromise our differences has led to a crisis of governance that is horrible, sad and humiliating.

At a Sacramento gathering of good government types earlier this year, one speaker wondered out loud if state voters possess the "civic literacy" necessary to fix what's wrong with state government.

Here was the polite version of an uncomfortable, even rude question: Are Californians too selfish, too shortsighted, too partisan or too apathetic to be part of the solution to the state's political and economic meltdown?

Or put another way: Do you and I get the government we deserve?

We can all agree that our politicians are inept. As state government careens toward an economic debacle, the people we elected seem utterly incapable of stopping it.

But we voted for them, didn't we? And then we found ways to enable their bad behavior and dysfunction.

We passed a slew of single-subject ballot measures that combined to hamstring state and local government. We refused to acknowledge that Proposition 13 left hometown government at the mercy of bureaucrats and politicians in Sacramento. We acquiesced to an angry and mean-spirited politics that led many of our best and brightest to conclude that public service wasn't worth sacrificing their reputations and their families.

Most of all, we sat on our hands while the people in Sacramento and their special-interest friends were running government into a ditch.

It's true that our elections often don't leave us with good choices, but we can change that if we decide to pay attention. We can support deserving candidates, and we can reform an electoral process designed to protect the political insiders.

For California, the next two or three years are going to be tough.

Public schools, once the envy of the world, will continue to eliminate vital programs. The public improvements that generate economic development - streets and highways, water and wastewater facilities - will continue to deteriorate. People hammered by an economic recession will find government isn't there to help them find a job or a doctor for their kids. Things we take for granted - parks, for example, or convenient services from government offices - will go away. And crime rates will go up because we will have fewer cops, fewer prosecutors and fewer jail cells - and fewer programs that help people choose not to commit crimes.

Out of money, we are left with no choice but to make shortsighted decisions that will have long-term financial and human consequences.

What we don't yet know is what California will be like five years from now. Will we learn from this crisis? Will we take back our government? Or will we remain on the sidelines, while the state continues its slide toward mediocrity?