What I love/hate about Pennsylvania

I love where I live. For those who don't know me, I live in beautiful Western Pennsylvania, about 30 miles north and west of Pittsburgh. I guess you'd call me a suburbanite (yechhhh, I hate that word! It's so pedestrian. I really don't want to be pedestrian. I want to be all metropolitan sophistication. But we are talking about Pittsburgh here, so I'll be realistic). Urban dwellers would call me rural. Whatever. It's great here. You have your mountains (well, they're not the Rockies, but lovely rolling foothills of the Alleghenies), you have your rivers (the famous Three Rivers of the Allegheny, Monongehela, and Ohio. We residents of Beaver County get the bonus river, the Beaver, of course), you have your state parks and forests, you have your quaint river towns, and you have your bustling medium sized city. It's a great place to raise a family (why I haven't is a blog for another day), to own a home (you can't imagine how affordable homes are here), and to pursue a safe and quiet life. Sure it has it's drawbacks like the occasional blizzard, only slightly more average annual days of sunshine than Seattle, and roads that have more holes than baby Swiss cheese (we just don't have the sheer size and population as that other Democratic bastion of the Commonwealth, Philly, nor the political pull of the Republican rest of the state to benefit from the incompetence and corruption that is PENNDOT), but I've seen how the other half lives. I'm staying put.

But I have a love/hate relationship with the rest of the Commonwealth. Let me get Philly out of the mix right off the bat. We hate Philly here in Western PA (actually, to be precise, it's Southwestern PA). It's big, it's flashy, it gets all the press, it gets all the money. No one ever holds political conventions here. No LiveAid concerts were produced here. Let's be honest here. We're hugely jealous. But we also love Philly. The City of Brotherly Love (Ha! Ever gone to a sporting event there? What load of shit that moniker is!) is the only other place in the entire state that thinks the same way we do. If it wasn't for Western PA and Philly proper, this would be the reddest of red states. So, though we struggle here with our feelings of inadequacy, I love Philadelphia (and it doesn't hurt that TR is in Philly, adding to my hot...I mean, warm feelings in my...heart, yeah, that's it, my heart).

It's what lies between these liberal urban bastions that disturbs me. It's the part of Pennsylvania that I call Pennsylbama. It sits between Pittsburgh and Philly like a big mushroom cloud, filled with beautiful scenery, scenic farms, and a population of about 300 made up of KKK harborers, NRA fanatics, Bible thumpers, Lyndon LaRouche followers, and Santorum worshipers. It has pristine roads, enough government pork to equal the Swift Premium yearly output, and a stranglehold on the power structure of the Pennsylvania Legislature. I detest these priggish, hypocritical, power hungry idiots.

A perfect illustration of the Pennsylbama mentality is the Intelligent Design court case currently making the national news: http://www.timesonline.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15286567&BRD=2305&PAG=740&dept_id=226967&rfi=6. Once again, we have to go through the whole battle of religion in the classroom. Because, have no doubts about it, that is what this case is all about. They couldn't get the religion in the front door, so they'll try the back door, any door to force it on us and our children. Because, you know, that's just what Jesus would do, wouldn't he? Lie, dissemble, distort, or use government force to get us all to jump on the "values" train. I grew up Catholic, so obviously my religious training is lacking because I haven't yet read anything about Christ and his life that explains these people's unnatural and unhealthy fascination with aberrant homosexual behavior, sex with animals, keeping women barefoot and pregnant, and the evils of caring for those less fortunate that are espoused in the handbook of this crowd written by the icon/hero of Pennsylbama, Senator Rick Santorum. It's stuff like this that makes me hate Pennsylvania.

But every once in a while (about once a century), the cosmos align and the PA Legislature does something that brings all the disparate parts of Pennsylvania together into one big howling mob of pure hate. And the only something that could actually do that is to direct all that energy at one target: their own greedy, boneheaded, arrogant selves. How have they managed this seemingly impossible feat? Why, they passed themselves a whopping 16 to 54% pay raise and then did an end run around the state constitution's requirement that the raise not take effect until the next term by using the current state surplus to put the money into each legislator's undesignated funds (WAMs - Walking Around Money) immediately. I must say that I am impressed at the Legislature's obvious desire to bring all the people of the Commonwealth together behind one cause: http://www.timesonline.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15278336&BRD=2305&PAG=461&dept_id=478663&rfi=6. Just imagine, teacher's unions, business leaders, NRA members, religious groups, white supremicists, the Urban League -- all united behind one cause: throw the bums, Republican and Democrat alike, in Harrisburg out!

This is when I looooooooove Pennsylvania.