States I’ll Never Visit: Louisiana
I’ve started a list of states that I will never visit, and I’m going to share it with you guys. This list certainly isn’t exhaustive and I will most certainly have duplicates, if only because these states are increasingly ridiculous. I could have started with Arizona – they’ve certainly given us enough reasons not to go there – but I thought I’d start with Louisiana.
Louisiana has been hit pretty hard by the BP oil spill. Huge portions of their coastline have been devastated by oil, with marine life dying left and right and fishermen out of jobs because of it. Oh, and that part where the oil spill is the worst spill of all time. But despite all that, their governor Bobby Jindal, as well as some other higher-ups in the state government, want to reopen offshore drilling. Hell, Jindal even wrote a letter to the president.
Look, I understand that people are out of jobs right now because of this. But you want to continue doing that thing that caused the spill in the first place? Really? Are you really that greedy that you can’t take some time to sort out the huge mess that you’re in? Maybe you should take all those people and pay them to help you clean up the gulf.
So until Bobby Jindal and/or those other people are out of office, I’ll never go to Louisiana. I guess I’ll have to hit up some places in the city for authentic Louisiana food.
1 comment
Personally, the only reason I wouldn’t visit one place or another, if I otherwise wanted to, would be security reasons. Even something abhorrent like state-sanctioned racism, you can come up with an out, like Paul Simon did with apartheid when he went to South Africa to write and record “Graceland”: he celebrated the place’s culture, not its politics.
Some perspective is useful, besides. Even in a deep-red state like Idaho, nearly a quarter of a million people voted for Obama. Nearly a quarter of a million! 36% of the vote. Conversely, 36% is about the margin that McCain got in California that year. In both states, plenty of voters for both candidates were nutbars and plenty of voters for both candidates were perfectly reasonable people with honest disagreements about policy. To not visit a state because its governor is a tool or worse seems silly to me, and unhelpfully vindictive. I don’t care about professional football, but I was happy for the people of New Orleans when the Saints won the Super Bowl.
Part of the official line about the travel restrictions on Cuba is that money Americans spend there will be funneled to the island’s Communist government. I remember when I was in high school I went to a lecture at Boise State University, and a visiting Chinese scholar encouraged students to visit China, which was and is a very safe place for Americans traveling abroad. Before hearing that I had never really considered it, but visiting just about anywhere, I think, offers good opportunities for learning. Fuck New Jersey though, that place is the worst.