Driving east across the America

A journey east across America makes me fall in love all over again with flyover country.

Nevada America
The view from my windscreen

Once again, I am traveling across the United States this time from West to East. As always, I am completely impressed by the immensity of the United States. America’s size is a reminder that leftism is primarily an urban phenomenon.

In the cities, some people do have cars. But a lot of the traveling in cities is by elevator, vertically. Other travel is done by easily accessible public transportation, either above or below ground, that takes people to and from points that are conveniently close to both the beginning and end of their journeys.

Given how readily available both vertical and public transportation are in the city, it is not surprising that leftist city dwellers are so cavalier when it comes to talking about doing away with the car. Just thinking about the New Green Deal which practically imagine trains connecting American to Hawaii. My offer to him might be that for every few cars they take off the road, they have to give up several elevators in their high-rise buildings.

The difference between the city and the vast interior of America also explains the urban, leftist obsession with income inequality. San Francisco is the perfect example. On the one hand, you have an aristocracy living in unimaginable wealth. On the other hand, you have the squalid, filthy street dwellers, who are indistinguishable from some imagined medieval peasant with no teeth and filthy clothes. 

In a way, San Francisco peasants are even worse than the medieval ones, because they’re not simply dirty and toothless, they are completely drug-ridden. Even my leftist friends in the Bay Area are bitterly aware of the irony that plastic straws are illegal, but that drug addicts are handed free plastic syringes that they then leave lying in the streets. People in San Francisco pick their way through the sidewalks, trying to avoid the piles of poop, puddled urine, needles and plastics syringes, and the  passed-out human beings. One thing my leftist friends cannot figure out, though, is that these disasters are the inevitable by-products of leftism.

But that is all behind me now. I am being driven down the long, open freeway across Nevada towards Utah. Once upon a time, I thought Nevada unattractive,  but having seen the deserts in Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California, none of which appeal to my aesthetic senses, I am more pleased with what I see in Nevada.

While I have been in the car I have been listening a little bit about the Mueller hearings. I have no respect for the man, and I’m not surprised to learn that he is backtracking constantly on things he said before, and that there was no collusion or obstruction. The thing that did surprise me most was learning that he knew nothing about Fusion GPS. That admission alone should consign his report forever to the incinerator of history.

Mostly though I have been paying attention to America, not politics. For example, in a rest stop I met a lovely professional trainer who gave me wonderful advice, for free, about how to deal with my dog’s separation anxiety and other issues. Throughout this trip, both going West and now heading back east again, I have seen what I consider to be the real America: friendly, helpful people unconcerned with the leftist obsessions about gender, skin color, political affiliation, etc. Instead, it’s just people. And not in the Soylent Green fashion. It’s just people who care about the common bond of being American and viewing the world as a friendly place inhabited by friendly folks.

As some of you have already figured out, I have left California behind and relocated to Tennessee. I love living in a flyover state. It is friendly and normal. Nature is staggeringly beautiful and prices are good. Why anybody would want to live in California now mystifies me. It’s so much nicer elsewhere.

One of the things I would like to do on this journey, if it all possible, is to meet up with readers along the way. I’m heading to Salt Lake City now, where I will spend the next day or two visiting with friends. After that I’ll be heading east for a few hundred miles, before dropping south in the direction of Denver, after which I head east again in the direction of Kansas City and Tennessee. I don’t have a map in front of me, so I can’t tell you the exact route, but I suspect you guys can figure it out. 

If you think you will be somewhere easily accessible from that freeway route and you would like to meet up, send me an email at bookwormroom *at* protonmail.com. The two caveats for any meet-up are that I don’t know my schedule, because we’re very relaxed on thus trip, and that I have a little dog with me, so I cannot leave him in the car or take him to restaurants. Walks or picnic tables work well. 

Anyway, I hope to hear from some of you. Even if we can’t meet each other, it will still be nice to have that conversation.