Opinion: A nine-point-oh, epicenter Sacramento

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We’ll make more sense of Tuesday’s events if we think of them not as an election but as an earthquake.

Elections roll around, we do our duty (at least some 23 percent of us voters did, a new worst-ever special election turnout record) and move on.

But earthquakes change things. They change us.

Earthquakes can level the status quo and they make us rethink not only what stood there that got knocked down, but what to put in its place, and how to take the opportunity, lamentable though it may be, to do better next time. That’s how we’ve always done it with earthquakes.

That’s what we need to do now. It really is time to reinvent the wheel. Calling a constitutional convention? By all means. I endorsed one back in March, when I wrote a column about ‘the misrule of our own making’ at the ballot box. Eureka and party on, I urged. Changing the initiative process? Sure. Fixing the split-roll disparity in Proposition 13? Yep. Making it harder to amend the state constitution? You betcha -- when you can put something in the constitution almost on a whim, with a 50-percent-plus-one vote, but you need at 2/3 vote to get it out, something is way out of kilter. That’s why we have more than five hundred constitutional amendments, some of them running smack into the intent of others. like a slapstick car wreck

The deplorable turnout meant that three out of four registered voters didn’t bother to show up on Tuesday. (It could have been worse, although I hate to say so. The vote to ratify the state’s first constitution, about 150 years ago, enticed only about 12% of eligible voters to the polls.)

That’s part of the earthquake parallel too. Virtually everything about governing and voting in the state has been severely shaken.

Voters who do go to the polls sometimes act like characters in the movie ‘’Groundhog Day.’’ We obliviously fail to connect the ballot in front of us with what we voted on last November or the June or March before then. We vote for programs without regard to how to pay for them, which makes us come off more like some legislators than we’d like; we send conflicting messages by our votes; we cheerily lock down half of the budget into legally mandated spending and then expect to be able to hack $21 billion out of the budget that’s left -- almost the entire cost of the UC system and the prison system -- by going after ‘’waste, fraud and abuse.’’

A recent Field Poll found that Californians didn’t want to cut anything from ten out of a dozen major state programs -- but also said, ‘Don’t you even think of raising my taxes to pay for them.’

Who are we kidding? Not ourselves -- not any more, we can’t.

So let’s pinpoint the Great Governance Quake: Tuesday, May 19, epicenter, the state capitol. Get out the granola bars and the emergency water supply and the orange safety vests. When the shaking stops, clear away the rubble and start all over again.

Otherwise, to scramble metaphors, we’ll wind up just changing the air freshener in the car when the engine is on fire.