Our brother-from-another-mother Big Country posts a heartwarming tale.
SO I was up at the U-Haul and this young-ish couple were in there all happy and talking about how they moved here just today…the guy behind the counter was all being nice and whatever…me being the bastard curmudgeon I’ve become, I asked where thy moved from…
“Rhode Island!” said the chirpy tatted-up girl…(maybe she was 22, 23 at most…) not bad looking but a lot of ‘warning tattoos’, i.e. dreamcatcher on her neck, the word ‘breathe’ on the inside of one wrist…her significant other, Mister “I could smell the soy from six feet away?” Yeah, his tats? Flowers. Lil daisies on the back of his elbows…bad hair, shitty handlestache…
Uh… yeeeah
I looked at ’em both, and growled “Welcome to Florida! Don’t you fucking dare vote like you did back home.” The guy behind the counter looked at me, and looked at them and nodded and said “Yep…don’t screw up our state like you did yours!”
On that I turned and walked out…let them chew on that bit of advice.
But folks like that are like an infectious virus.
Moving in from a fucked up state, to OUR state, and then voting in the same types of assholes who made their state of origin all fucked up, which, while NOT intentionally planning on fucking it all up again, but doing so, and then wondering “How did this happen?” Self awareness purely doesn’t exist in the hive-mind of a liberal I swear.
Their look of shock was great.
Heh. I just bet it was at that, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer brace of assholes. Wish I’d been there to see it; I call ‘em locusts, myself, which I think is a very apt and fitting name for ‘em.
I’ve read in several different places over the past cpl-three years or so that, according to the stats, that’s actually not so much the case, though—that the vast majority of those fleeing the blighted, pestilential urban hellholes are NOT the idiot libs who did so much to help make them what they are, but are in actual fact mostly RightwingNaziDeathBeasts who have, after many years of suffering through the gradual, pre-planned decline, finally gotten a bellyful of it and decided to uproot and make good their escape. Never an easy decision to make, especially for someone who has lived in such an area his whole life, with deep family roots in what we unreconstructed Southrons used to call the old home-place.
Having lived for many years in one such example—CLT, which admittedly has always leaned pretty sharply Left, as has the entire state; over my entire lifetime, I can remember but one nominally “Republican” mayor, the execrable stealth-liberal Pat McRory—I dunno whether I buy the aforementioned statistics or not; I gotta say, I’m skeptical. But who knows, it could be so; with the widening Right-Left divide becoming more and more hardened and virulent over the past several years, it may very well be. It’d be nice if it was, that’s for definite sure.
The dead giveaway that you’re looking at a locust infestation as you drive around any given neighborhood? One of those obnoxiously self-righteous “In this house, we believe…” signs posted in the front yard. Know that, and adjust your behavior towards the occupants accordingly.
Big-city living is not ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea; for years, it was certainly mine, although nowadays I wouldn’t live in the city, any city, if you paid me by the hour. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that it has to be a horrible, unbearable nightmare, either. For many, many years, American cities were envied around the world as desirable, worthwhile places to live and work—to ENJOY living, rather than merely existing. As with so many other things, the question must be: Who did this to us, and why on Earth did we ever allow it to happen?
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Young democraps, old democraps, they all suck,
No matter how many bits of ominous-sounding advice such persons are given:
Lather; rinse; repeat.
The reason: “should” be “obvious” by now. For the benefit of those without a scorecard: It’s a religious thing.
Any doubt how many of them, and others like them, will be seated as Trump jurors?
I look at 50s NYC in movies and realize it was different then.
Perfect? No.
I still rather have grown up in the Wonder Years suburbs I did.
But it was there and made a.small comeback under Giuliani that held until the end of the Bloomberg years.
All downhill since.
Oh, don’t sell Rudy short, kenny, it was a YUUUUGE comeback. I know, I was there and I watched it happen, moving there in the last days (weeks, actually) of Dinkens after having visited the place on the regular going all the way back to the Koch years. After Koch and Dinkens, the difference Giuliani made was nothing less than remarkable, almost miraculous.
I was born and raised in little ol’ Mt Holly, NC and like you, I wouldn’t have it any other way; it was about as idyllic an old-fashioned American upbringing as you could possibly imagine, and it was wonderful. My family and neighborhood wasn’t by any means wealthy, but nonetheless I was truly blessed in so many other ways.
That said, I wouldn’t trade my NYC years for anything either, though. I have friends there who still refer to the 90s as “the last rock and roll good time in New York,” and from what I’ve seen they’re right about that. Apres Giuliani, le deluge; things have been on a downhill slide ever since.
Giuliani came in as Mayor and, much like a certain other fellow New Yorker in DC, against all odds and most expectations things improved very nearly overnight. Also like DC, it won’t happen again–it CAN’T happen again, things have changed far too much, in far too many ways, for it to ever be repeated. That’s a sad thing for everyone, even those who aren’t smart enough to realize it.
OK I have to agree. It was a Yuge change. Especially from the nadir of the Dinkins Years.
Yes, it will (I won’t say never) be decades before the rot could ever be reversed now and that would require them STARTING now. Which they won’t until it really makes the Dinkins Years look like Heaven.
That is why I live in NC now. The suburbs on LI are slowly getting the disease as well and at the same time the Cost of Living is through the roof. 75% higher than here.
I wasn’t moving back to the States from High Cost (and sliding into tyranny) Hong Kong only to land in the fire under the frying pan.
40 years ago when I would fly through NY with enough time to walk around the city a bit or stay over a night, it looked like big city America.
Now, I can fly home through NY and can’t tell much difference from the shithole I just left.
Indeed.