I’m sorry, weren’t we talking about intellectual activity, articulate language, introspection, open-mindedness, and curiosity a short time ago?

There’s an interesting filter on your perception here. Anybody else notice it?

1000 ft above sea level, 4 seasons, no ac needed until July and 2-3 nice snows per year. Lots of money, beautiful home, sports, culture, nothing not to like, except the occasional traffic jam.

A corporate down size fated me to VT where you have 2 months of summer and 10 months of tough sledding. Hated it for a number of reasons.

In the best of all worlds Atlanta would have been my lifetime home

I was brought up in a immigrant, working class family in a minority ghetto, I was the first person in my family to finish college, only the second to go at all(my grandfather briefly attended medical school in Havana in the first decade of the 20th century). All of my family, friends and aquaintances were working class, there were no businessmen or professionals, no managers or even property owners among the people we knew.

But we honored intellectual achievement, education, it was drilled into us constantly. It was honorable to educate oneself, it was the only way out of poverty, to rise up into a position of respect and influence in the community. Being first in school academics had the highest priority, much higher than sports, or popularity, or clothes, cars and sex.

The attitude I got from too many (not all, of course) of my contemporaries, was that smart people were sissies, cowards, conceited, and socially inept, if not politically incorrect or downright unpatriotic. I could see the process at work all around me: smart kids, many smarter than me, being shamed and bullied into pretending they were stupid just so they could fit in. Fortunately, I had the cultural training to resist the peer pressure, and I met and befriended other kids like me who felt the same way.

People can’t help being ignorant. And its not their fault if their education is lacking. But the kind of stupid redneck trailer trash hatred of intelligence and learning I’m talking about is cultural, it has to be taught to children and constantly reinforced in adults. I’ve known this ever since I was a kid, everyone who isn’t born into that culture but has to live immersed in it knows it. It permeates whole class and economic strata of rural Southern society, as does the racism and violence and intolerance, nativism and nationalism, clannishness and suspicion of strangers. And then there’s the religious fanaticism and intolerance. These people are just fucked up.

And I now see variations of that same perverse world view being cultivated and promoted in some of our modern political ideologies and movements–very often by an unprincipled leadership who certainly knows better, but who also realizes this unfortunate peasant mentality makes an easily manipulated and exploited political base.

The ignorance to which I referred was not that of one who refuses to learn rather sophisticated philosophical differences or who ignores facts which interfere with their personal biases. I was referring to the ignorance which has a limited understanding of the language they were born into, who regard concern for the issues of the community around them as “bullshit”, whose solution to all foreign issues is to “nuke ‘em”. Proud of their having fathered 4 or 5 children, they will say that the kids are doing all right, their mothers are on welfare. They explain over a couple of beers they would work, their highest aspiration is to work and provide for their children, they love them more than anything, but with a couple of felonies no one would hire them. A driver’s license was a distant reality, insurance an interesting idea, and it isn’t really stealing if it wasn’t locked up.

That’s a slightly different sort of ignorance than that displayed by those indifferent to the effects of their actions on others, who don’t care if people are starved, killed, maimed or dispossessed in the quest for corporate profits.

I hated Puerto Rico, and even though I was professionally very successful there, I felt I was young enough to get a new start somewhere else, so I took the chance. It took me 5 years to make up the ground I lost. I left California due to a layoff from a defense industry-wide recession. It took me about five years to recover from that.

I moved back to Florida after years away (in places I really loved) because I had been out of work for a year, and I felt I needed to be somewhere where I had family and friends before my resources ran out altogether. After the family died off and the friends dispersed, I had a mortgage and a pension plan to tie me down, and a family that depended on me.

We don’t always get the chance to freely pick where we live.
Whatever freedom of choice we do have is strongly influenced by economic necessity, and our available resources in being able to adapt to new conditions, not to mention the responsibilities we have committed along the way to fulfill. I’m very aware of the personal sacrifices and choices we have to make because of economic necessity, and you’ve probably noticed it is a topic I often post on. The role of free will is highly exaggerated. I’ve probably done better than most of the people I know, but I still resent some of the choices I feel I have been forced to make for purely economic reasons. Still, I’m grateful that I at least had choices. I’m perfectly aware most people don’t even have that.

Of course, in spite of some local cultural differences, the USA is a remarkably uniform country, overall. The variations within a place often exceed the differences between places. Rural Florida may be a mean and hateful place, but my years in a small university community on the outskirts of Tampa were the most rewarding and stimulating in my life. Oak Ridge, Tennessee is probably not representative of the rest of that state. And the Santa Clara Valley and and Pittsburgh may not really represent the rest of their states either. I guess even Hell has nice neighborhoods.

As for the climate, Florida is paradise for about 3 months a year. The rest of the time it sucks. I miss the snow.

I wouldn’t call you any of the choices you gave us. I can only wonder why you chose to live out your life in a place you hold in such contempt. I can only surmise it was to be near family and others you feel comfortable with, as have i. The big difference is, I have no contempt beyond my dislike of the humidity in the summer.