Always on the go.

That was the biggest crock I've read here in a long, long time.

"Dirty" means simply that. Dirty. There's nothing racial or even economic about it. It's as much about people having pride of ownership than anything else. And I've seen far more pride of ownership in south central LA than in some of the redneck pearly white towns near where I live in Missouri. OTOH there's lots of pride of ownership in Springfield MO too...it's a nice town. Houston is dirty.

It's also about having adequate infrastructure so people can actually move about...and most southern cities just don't.
 
hindsight2020 said:
For some of us, continental living doesn't have to be elitist, picturesque, or racially hegemonic in order to not be considered "dirty". The point of continental living is cheap access to the artifacts of living that allows us to prosper, in ways that are economically prohibitive in resource-limited islands. That's it. The rest of the discussion is just preferences, regional cultural "-isms" and entitled petulance.
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Agreed.

hindsight2020 said:
We'd give a kidney to be able to relocate life and employment to Houston area or San Antonio. We're getting the wife through nursing school, and at the end of it we will get to relocate away from real socioeconomic strife; very much looking forward to it. The fact remains, aviation has made the world smaller. I don't need to live in Bawwstah to see an overpriced game in Fenway, walk around Beacon Hill and see the sights while freezing my rear 6 months out the year.
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Agreed.


hindsight2020 said:
I have to say though....What a bunch of code speak this thread is honestly. My kid doesn't need to be raised in the "culturally dignified" coasts in order to be good enough to compete in the global market and hold his own at places like Georgia Tech, MIT or Purdue. His father was born and raised in a coconut tree-laden second-world colony of the United States, and I still got the above T-shirts.
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Uh oh. Headed off the rails.

hindsight2020 said:
Bottom line, "Flyover Country", and the concrete jungles that litter its landscape, is still First world.
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Hmmm. Most of flyover country is agricultural. And the concrete "jungles" aren't very impressive compared to the coasts.

hindsight2020 said:
The problem with the narrative in this thread is that the subtext of the objections raised are highly socioeconomic and racially hegemonic in nature, but nobody has the stones to say what they mean. "Code speak" for racial and socioeconomic preferences is such an American staple. The fact the whole discourse on dirty cities was started by a suburbia-raised white woman under the age of 30 who monikers herself as a "princess" in a male-dominated hobby, is so par for the course it's kinda of a snooze actually.
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Whoa there for a second. I've been to a bunch of big cities, it was my job to travel to them weekly, and they simply were actually dirty. I'd have to go re-read every comment to see, but I doubt most of them above were any silly code-speak for any particular skin color.

The smell of urine is common on the NYC subway system. So common that celebrities make jokes about it on national TV. The overcrowded cities actually are... Dirty. Funny that.

I have a Hawaiian friend who's quite "brown" who calls herself and/or her daughter a "princess", too. She's not part of any royal family lineage that I'm aware of, nor do I suspect is the New Jersey person here.

And of course, I try to avoid overcrowded hell holes and I live in nothing but dirt out here. Dirt road, dirt driveway, dirt in every filter all summer... Heh.

The back door neighbor is from Peru. He's "brown". I and a different "brown" guy helped an elderly German immigrant with a thick accent drag his sorry assed excuse for a vehicle for driving on said dirt roads in winter, up the hill with the brown guy's pickup truck that was raised higher than mine yesterday. (Mine isn't lifted at all actually. Ha.) He's a better redneck than I am, if we're labeling people for no reason now. Or is that brownneck? Haha.

hindsight2020 said:
Look, America is a lot more brown and a lot more poor than the demographics of this avocation lend to.
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Agreed. Genetics. Science. Fiat currency and massive debt driven consumerism. Duh.

hindsight2020 said:
Y'all just need to get over that and stop adjudicating dirtiness to the socioeconomic change fostered by the very economic policies you all voted for in the first place. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes aka, vote in economic policies against your collective self-interest because they come bundled with non-issue social policies you happen to agree with, you win the trojan horse stupid prize of economic downgrade three generations later. We're all in this boat together, we're all "dirty". Holing up in Boston and calling it dignified living ain't gonna change that.
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Hmmm. What economic policies did I vote for? Last time I checked, I don't get to vote for those at all, considering it's a fake representative government -- and the people supposedly representing me haven't voted in policies I would approve of in my entire lifetime.

(Had a hard time figuring out what you were "on about" as my Aussie friends would say. Might want to look up what "adjudicating" means.)

If you want to blame politicians, great. They're quite immoral people. As far as this guy in the PoA "demographic" goes, I don't care at all about skin color. I care that you're not an ass and helped the old guy with your truck. That's society. Not the political crap on the Boob Tube that you're paraphrasing.

And damn it. He has a really nice truck. Looked old and well maintained like mine. I bet he owns it outright like mine too. We've waved at each other on the road before but his place is about a half mile away so meeting behind the old German's car was our first opportunity to say hi and shake our collective heads at driving a Ford front wheel drive Eurobubble in a snowstorm together -- when the old German wasn't looking.

My old German ancestors taught me this cool stuff about ground clearance and four wheel drive. His brown ancestors may have taught him also. I dunno. We both will be up to our axels in mud and dirt in a few days when it warms up, and both of our trucks will be quite brown.

I hope school is over soon for your wife and you can move to Houston if you like it. It's not my cup of tea. Tenting the entire house for killing bugs every few years, ain't my idea of fun.

Get out of the city urbanization hell hole if you can. It makes people believe all the racial crap. I swear.

Nurses are always in demand anywhere. And the neighbors generally like anyone who pulls their weight and helps others in rural areas.

If you want what I would think would be a tough life out here, you should see the disabled dude in the electric wheelchair. That dude has that thing cranked up to warp speed and cruises the dirt road at like 100 MPH. He'll slam it through ditches and tall grass to get wherever he's going. Total bad ass. We all watch out for him on the road both so as to not run him over and also in case he breaks down. He's not "brown" but he'd be treated no different if he was. He'll get ticked at you if you offer him a ride. I made that "mistake" once. So I joked with him that we could race instead, and that made him laugh.

Just sharing to let you know that this is pretty typical of most "flyover" places. We're still too close to a big city to be considered flyover, but we're as close as we can get to it. Nobody here cares what color of skin anyone has. We do notice if someone is an ass, though.

We have do "code-speak" for that. "That guy is an ass. Did you see him drive around the old German in the snowstorm and not help pull his car up the hill?" It's pretty easy to translate. Haha. We tend to not have time to hunt for our code books the politicians say we have stashed somewhere.

Killing a neighbor's goat after locking it in a garage with your dogs for days and letting them injure it, is generally shunned. And we have one of those stories. But that's a different story. That family isn't liked by pretty much anyone. But they're also idiots, so we all just give them a wide berth. They're not brown.

Wanna come drive the tractor? I need to go snowblow the driveway now. Maybe if there's time before the sun goes down and enough diesel I the can, I'll clear the road over to the brown guy's house behind me. He's such a damned good cook, I try to find ways to stay in his good graces and on his wife's food distribution list.

He and his wife moved here from the California suburbs and homeschool their kids out here now. The kids are both book smart and really well grounded in common sense. Something I doubt the kids would have been if they'd stayed in California.

His wife was a little naive about solar power when she moved out here but I helped explain that she'd need a lot of really heavy batteries to keep her well pump running in winter, and when she ordered them to let us know and we'd come help move them with the tractor front end loader and help hook it all up. That was three years ago and I haven't seen any solar panels in their field yet. We offered to let them borrow the extra generator back when I thought it would start. Now they'd have to deal with figuring out why it won't. :)

Funny thing was, Javier knew it and hadn't been able to convince her that solar wasn't in their budget. He smiled and winked at me from behind her when I asked her about the batteries. Hahaha. Smart man. Maintaining marital bliss. Let the neighbor tell his wife her goofy solar idea was going to be a lot more work than she planned for. Hahaha. :)
 
Yeah, I don't know about that H2020. In the military we always make the best of where we live. As long as we have family, our disposition is that any duty station is "home." I've been to where you currently live and for lack of a better word, it sucks. My uncle lives there and for the life of me, can't understand why he retired there.

I've lived all over the country and I've lived all over the world. There are places that are flat out dirty. The city is filthy. There's no scenery. Traffic is horrible. You put up with those conditions because you're there on business. Usually, undesirable living locations attract jobs so it's a necessary evil. Fortunately, I now have a job that allows me to live in a clean, retirement type community.

Fact is there are beautiful places in this country and other areas that are just plain or unattractive. You can take a pic of a sunset in Delaware and brag about it on FB but that don't make it Hawaii. That's not a racial or socioeconomic observation either.
 
I certainly retract the generalized manner in which I attributed the "dirty" narrative to the entire cohort of contributors to the thread. My apologies for not being more specific in my comments. I suppose the only person I'd have a bone to pick with would be the OP.

I'm not a Houston cheerleader by any means. I consider the manner in which people price-war themselves over social AND racial lines in that and many metros, a particularly unattractive QOL metric. But so do people from Boston, one of whom is my closest friend from college. Im just sick of New England snobbery, when their concept of dignified and cultured living is a hypocrisy standing on the shoulders of urban slums.

This topic hits a nerve with me because I was raised in a place where landscape would uplift your soul, up until the point where economic inequality and social strife would literally cost you your life. For people to deride the dirtiness of the urban centers where most Americans make their coin and afford to live, is just too naive a perspective for me to take seriously.

Again, my apologies for taking license with the "collective" perspective of the board on this topic. It was a presumptuous position to take without the prior benefit perspective of each and every one of you. One of the things I value out of my military tenure is indeed the variance of prior experience from those who one calls neighbors and co-workers at different stages in the journey. I don't particularly like the nomadism of it, but I can say my life has been enriched by being exposed to such variety of perspective. POA is like that in a way. Next beer's on me :)
 
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Where can I sign up for the "reading between the lines 101" course? It might have been an elective but I took Geology 401 instead.
 
GlennAB1 said:
For sure; You can find dirt anywhere... just open your eyes.
Click to expand...

Yep. In fact here is some in Tim Winter's town. Filthy place. :D

CGI2_small.jpg
 
Tim doesn't actually live there, tho.
 
hindsight2020 said:
For some of us, continental living doesn't have to be elitist, picturesque, or racially hegemonic in order to not be considered "dirty". The point of continental living is cheap access to the artifacts of living that allows us to prosper, in ways that are economically prohibitive in resource-limited islands. That's it. The rest of the discussion is just preferences, regional cultural "-isms" and entitled petulance.

We'd give a kidney to be able to relocate life and employment to Houston area or San Antonio. We're getting the wife through nursing school, and at the end of it we will get to relocate away from real socioeconomic strife; very much looking forward to it. The fact remains, aviation has made the world smaller. I don't need to live in Bawwstah to see an overpriced game in Fenway, walk around Beacon Hill and see the sights while freezing my rear 6 months out the year.

I have to say though....What a bunch of code speak this thread is honestly. My kid doesn't need to be raised in the "culturally dignified" coasts in order to be good enough to compete in the global market and hold his own at places like Georgia Tech, MIT or Purdue. His father was born and raised in a coconut tree-laden second-world colony of the United States, and I still got the above T-shirts.

Bottom line, "Flyover Country", and the concrete jungles that litter its landscape, is still First world. The problem with the narrative in this thread is that the subtext of the objections raised are highly socioeconomic and racially hegemonic in nature, but nobody has the stones to say what they mean. "Code speak" for racial and socioeconomic preferences is such an American staple. The fact the whole discourse on dirty cities was started by a suburbia-raised white woman under the age of 30 who monikers herself as a "princess" in a male-dominated hobby, is so par for the course it's kinda of a snooze actually.

Look, America is a lot more brown and a lot more poor than the demographics of this avocation lend to. Y'all just need to get over that and stop adjudicating dirtiness to the socioeconomic change fostered by the very economic policies you all voted for in the first place. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes aka, vote in economic policies against your collective self-interest because they come bundled with non-issue social policies you happen to agree with, you win the trojan horse stupid prize of economic downgrade three generations later. We're all in this boat together, we're all "dirty". Holing up in Boston and calling it dignified living ain't gonna change that.
Click to expand...


You complain about "code speak" but your post is full of big words, and its difficult to understand what, if any point you are making. Honestly who says things like "racially hegemonic" or "entitled petulance"?
 
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I hope you have a good time in Boston.

I live most of the year in north central MA and love it. People ask me why MA and I normally respond- "Have you ever lived in KS" We bought this house to get a nice summer and no wind.
 
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