You cannot have a Venice without a Naples, you cannot have a Saint Petersburg without a Moscow, you cannot have a Grosse Point without a Flint, you cannot have a London without a Liverpool.
It's perfectly okay that you PREFER to live in a region that has a favorable climate and ecology for attractive green space, Rick.
I applaud your good taste and I think you have every right to express your preference.
But your Numan-like war on SoCal goes beyond expressing a preference.
In numerous posts and even entire threads, you've expressed the desire to separate the two regions and divorce from SoCal in the misguided belief that you can pretend to make 17 million people and their needs disappear, or that they can be palmed off to some redneck empire, simply because our ecology, our climate, and our industrial trends conflict with your sense of aesthetics.
It's because there are industrial zones and cities that aesthetes like yourself get to have your preferences, Rick.
Your region didn't want the development, so it went elsewhere.
But that's not good enough for you.
You'd rather it didn't exist at all.
And I say you wouldn't make it without your rough and distasteful counterparts in the L.A. Basin.
Just as not everyone can be a day trader or a CEO, not everyone can be a NorCal dandy, sipping tea while overlooking the Golden Gate.
Someone has to make stuff, someone has to run factories, someone has to do the uncouth things that you eschew.
Your argument is beyond mere prissy disdain, which is bad enough.
It's unreasonable, it's narrow-minded and it is intolerant.
It's also unworkable. California needs L.A. every bit as much as it needs the idyllic scenery of the North.
And besides, you need to visit your Central Valley area and clean up your meth labs. They're quite bothersome to those of us in the South who already put up with the ones out East in the Inland Empire.
