(time to annoy Hearthie? Hope she's forgiving!)
OK, as a former resident of Colorado, I'm of course an expert at disliking the problems Californians bring when they emigrate--gangs, drugs, crime, high prices, liberal politics, tofu, and the like. And yet even I was surprised when I learned that the Portugese are saying, in effect, "Don't Californicate our nation", as hordes of California refugees have arrived in Portugal and are bringing their particular maladies there as well. It reminds me of a billboard I'm told got put up in Texas saying "Welcome Californians! But remember you are refugees, not missionaries."
Now of course, there are a lot of Texans in Colorado as well, and natives also disliked the side effects that Texans brought. I'm reminded of a joke.
A Californian, a Texan, and a Coloradan (Portugese) are sitting in a bar, talking. Trying to show off, the Californian takes a sip out of a $100 bottle of cabernet sauvignon, throws the rest of the bottle in the air, and shoots it with his MAC-10. He then says "where I come from, we've got plenty of that." The Texan then orders a $110 bottle of tequila and does the same. "Wheyah ahh come from, we've got plenty of that."
So the Coloradan (Portugese) takes a bottle of microbrew IPA (Port), drinks the whole thing, and shoots the Californian and the Texan.
6 comments:
The very day Hearthie's husband gets a job offer Not Here, Hearthie will be packing. I'm hoping for Idaho, which is decidedly tired of CA's refugee crisis.
But of course one has to have a sense of humor about it. Do you remember the 80s when everyone was GOING to CA? Oy. It got so I bought one of the bumper stickers that said, 'CA Native" for my dad. (My dad, being my dad, put it on his poster of Chairman Mao). They were very popular stickers... :p So I've been annoyed by the influx of non-natives too.
And we choose states in waves to annoy. It was WA during the 90s. Currently it's TX and ID, with some to FL and TN (but Westerners gotta be Western).
I mean, surely you don't think we're popping babies out fast enough to have taken our town's population from 38000 when I was born to 175000 not-quite-50 years later?
:^) It was also Colorado and Oregon in the 1990s. Seriously, yes, I remember that in the 1980s, and I think a lot of it is that California differs so strongly culturally from the rest of the country. In the 1990s, it was high housing prices and California conservatives were settling in CO. Now the liberals have figured out how bad it is and how much home equity they have.
I was so bummed when I realized that CO had gone as hard core blue as OR and WA. I swear we exported CONSERVATIVES. I'd rather escape to OR or WA as far as weather goes but no more blue states for Hearthies. (DH thinks CO is the bomb, but again - sooo blue).
Actually I have a theory. Refugees tend to be conservatives... but opportunists (who come in larger numbers) are more liberal. Or at least more easily swayed to the liberal side. I don't remember the droves having much in the way of convictions, just being really bad fakes, thus the bumper sticker.
Westerners qua westerners tend to be libertarian, honestly.
PPS When I was a kid, CA was red. My county stayed red until the Obama years. And please don't blame the illegal aliens, they're more conservative than I am.
My take with Colorado is that the California refugees more or less took Colorado from a socially liberal, but fiscally conservative, state to one where there was borderline social conservatism. Then they legalized marijuana, and all the dopers came in, and all heck broke loose.
Another thing going on there was that a lot of families left there who were poorer because they wanted to get away from the Crips and Bloods (sadly, too often, their kids already were), and they tended to bring liberal politics with them. And then when the conservatives from California left, they tended to attract some of their liberal neighbors.
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