A sad way to live

This morning as I was going down to the workout room at our hotel I chatted up a guy who was from Phoenix. He commented about how cold it was. He then went on to say he was glad to be out of LA because it was a terrible place. I said "Oh, yeah the traffic." He said, his father had helped to plan the freeways but what he was concerned about was not the traffic but the immigrants. The city has 19 nationalities where LA holds the second largest population out of the home country. I made some comment like - "Well, Phoenix is likely to see an influx soon." He said he would simply move to more and more remote parts of Nevada.

The immigration wave in the country, which California seemed to have had the first wave, has changed our state. There are more people. They have different ways of looking at the world and of eating and a whole bunch of other customs. But in the end, the society is richer for it. I am not sure I could stand always runnning from something instead of looking to what we can build on as a people. Unfortunately, there are some in LA who harbor the same kind of thoughts. On KFI radio there are the Pot and Pan bangers John and Ken who, as mentioned in one of my previous posts, seem to delight in saying the outrageous and offensive. They seem aggressively ignorant - not unlike the former talk show host in Sacramento, Mark Williams.

Luckily, I think most Californians would rather think about how to deal with the challenges than run away from them. It is awful cold back there in the shadows.