I am ashamed of being an Arizonan and if I had the opportunity I would leave this god-forsaken state that has been home to me for the last quarter of a century. This is the state that was forced to acknowledge the Martin Luther King holiday, kicking and wailing. That is where we got the racist governor Evan Mecham (RIP) who turned the tide on that holiday and set back the civil rights gains by a generation by rescinding the Martin Luther King holiday that had been signed
into law by his predecessor, Governor Bruce Babbitt, who went on to become interior Secretary under Clinton. Instead Arizona wallows in vain glory of a nineteenth century-frontier state. That explains why we have dregs like “toughest sheriff in America” Sheriff, Joe Arpaio who is more interested in arresting illegal aliens (overstepping his constitutional obligations) rather than solving abundant crime in Phoenix and Arizona in general. He is more interested in parading
prisoners in pink and in chains. Then you have that fascist state representative Russell Pierce who is more interested in enforcing so-called Employer sanctions laws than creating jobs.
Meanwhile, education is not given any priority. Arizona has the worst teen pregnancies in the country and its education is also at the bottom. This is a state that never built a new university in that long twentieth century we have just left behind and I looked with envy at Michelle Obama’s commencement speech at the newest twenty-first century University in California at Merced. In contrast all (only) the three universities Arizona has are nineteenth century relics. Yes, Arizona is
hell-on-earth in this land of the free and brave and if I get the chance, I will go back to Pennsylvania where I originally came from.