Where's Arizona Headed?

Let's start with some things we all know:

1. The United States government is corrupt. Since Nixon, or before, our country has been sold to corporate interests.

2. We've been sold a picture of America which is simply not true. The nuclear family of the 50's doesn't exist and never really did.

3. We all want what is best for our children and in the larger view what is good for America, and her continued existence.

4. Arizona, being a western state, is in better shape as far as infrastructure than those states that were traditionally centers of power in this nation.

Okay, some might argue these sentiments, and they're welcome to. This blog is called "Correct me if I'm wrong..." for a reason. But these are at least my observations and they bring me to the premise of this blog posting. So I'll argue them:

1. Since the Supreme Court released its judgement in the Citizen's United case, the ability of Corporations to influence the political debate in this country has gone unchecked. There may be many examples of this, but the one that sticks in my mind is the fact that Sarah Palin can operate a SuperPAC while still being employed by FOX News. This demonstrates the interweaving of large conglomerate corporate interests with the political interests of powerful individuals. As people donate to SarahPAC, they are probably not aware that she is a paid representative of a media outlet. So because of their ability to inundate public discourse with money, their free speech is more available than my free speech, or even of the free speech of other possible Republican candidates. Thus, the corporation is unfairly able to influence political decisions, and has unequal representation.

2.  Since "Leave it to Beaver," the image of 50's America has been one of homogenous tranquility. All the families were white, and father knew best. The idea of product placement wasn't as pervasive then, but we all knew the best cigarettes to smoke, and that Borax was the best cleaner. An image was created and people have been trying to live up to it ever since. Still, that show was fictional and the real world of the fifties was one of racism, sexism, and political intolerance. Now, we have "Mad Men" and while slightly more honest about the reality of the fifties and sixties, that show still demonstrates a sexy ideal. The story most people share of the real fifties is filled with hard work, acceptance of hard times, and aspirations for better... later.

3. I don't think there is much argument here, except that this argument is used to create an "other" in our nation which would do harm to this ideal. For example, on the right the argument is that the left wants to destroy the future for our kids by taking away freedoms and spending our money; while on the left the argument is that the right wants to destroy our children's future by raping the planet in the search for one more elusive dollar, while ignoring the community responsibility that is education. Neither argument is accurate, and only serves an elite class, both liberal and conservative, that doesn't act at all in the interest of American ideals.

4. On the east coast, whose infrastructure is almost a hundred years older than that of the west, there is a crisis occurring as that infrastructure crumbles around our ears and the civic monies available to rebuild it is gone. The east's ability to develop is seriously hampered by the lack of current grid technologies as well as the extreme cost of maintaining the overdeveloped plumbing and roads. Just repairing old bridges has stymied development as far west as Detroit.

So all of these points can be argued, but I want to use them to develop a premise. An idea for my State, that represents all the possibilities we can take advantage of:

Arizona is poised to lead the nation.

For many who live here, Arizona is viewed as a quiet backwater with clean air and lots of sunshine, where conservative values are realized but remains under threat of immigration and liberalism.

A broad stroke, as Arizona means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but viewed through the lens of my thirty-plus years here, I would say that is the overarching ideal.

Arizona came about at the end of the Civl War, a western outpost for Confederate sentiment. The cowboys that borrowed the Hohokam canals to develop Phoenix were a rag-tag bunch from all over the east braving the desert to create a hard-scrabble existence. The five C's; Cotton, Copper, Cattle, Citrus, and Climate, were the resources these tough people would use to scrape out their place. Of course, this ignores what was here at the time, a forgotten northern outpost for Mexico. These indigenous peoples, the Yaqui, were accommodated then marginalized by the growing metropolis of Phoenix.

Today, we still try to live by these ideals. We consider ourselves to be a rural society, scraping by, as we are the sixth largest city in the nation. We maintain that our five C's are still the most important resources we have even as we destroy them. For instance, Cotton and Citrus fields have largely been paved over as the city grew, and even if they hadn't a global economy has required that those agrarian industries be moved to more undeveloped nations. Copper, at an all time price high, has largely been mined out in Arizona, as the traditional companies which mined the metal have been sold, repackaged and re-sold to prevent bankruptcy after bankruptcy. Cattle is an environmentally needy industry. While diminished in Arizona, the cattle industry still exists but has been shown in study after study to no longer be environmentally sustainable. Effecting lastly, our Climate, which brought out a large number of tuberculosis patients years ago, has sustained vast change as our cities developed and the larger climate of the U.S. changed. What a mild spring we had this year. The irony of our mild spring, wasn't lost on me as I watched the midwest flood, and now burn.  Politically, we consider ourselves to still be the vanguard southerners who developed here a hundred years ago. While subdued by legislation and media, our racist sentiments still pervade and are used against us to generate unsubstantiated fears.

If you froze time and this is where the people of Arizona stood, I think it would be a fair description.

So where do we go next? How do we come to lead the nation?

At every transitional moment there is opportunity. Opportunity for both momentum backwards, or forwards. Arizona, at this transitional moment can dramatically go either way.

First, if we don't take advantage, stay the course, we could fall into the same trap that the rest of the nation is in. Like every State, we are suffering the current downturn. Our strongest industry of the last three decades (not one of the five C's, by the way,) construction has been virtually destroyed by the housing bubble. Only the service industry is continuing to grow in Arizona. Our current investment in education, infrastructure, the arts, etc., is set to maintain this direction. The only housing we'll be building is giant mega-mansions for the wealthy people who own the service companies and cheap, bad quality housing for the underpaid service industry employees. We're poised to ignore our resources to make the environment unacceptable for anyone who would develop our State differently. Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. We got here together and it'll take all of us to get away from this future.

The other direction is where we can jump ahead easily and become a driving force in the future of our country.

Because all of our primary industries have taken a hit, we have the opportunity to step back and create a future from whole cloth and go in a direction none of us have seen before. Because we were developed later than the east coast, we don't have the obstructions that they have to future development. Our grid is almost capable of handling our technology driven progress (progress as a nation. I'm not presuming to choose the direction for the State.) The resources of the future, sustainable resources, are Arizona's in premium. They call Florida the Sunshine State, but even they can't argue that the Sun hits here more and harder, and more regularly. Because of Arizona's singular tri-level geography, we also have more wind, and the Colorado is still flowing here. These resources go largely ignored here, but that is slowly changing. We can develop our State as the new energy leader and as the requirements of a technological future require it, we'll be ready to lead.

Politically, we've continued to stymy this innovation. We must abandon our ideal of protectionism of a reality that never existed. With real analysis, those who fear "others" and "outsiders" will realize that they too exist as a part of that population. The abandonment of this non-reality, which is easy to do by the way, will eliminate the ability of fear-mongers to take advantage of us and free us to accept the ideas that can propel us ahead of the nation. As I said, the government is owned. But in reality it is only being borrowed, and we can take it back and create something new and wonderful with it.

Go back an look at the four premises of this article. You will see that essentially, I am arguing that we've been lied to, and because those lies have fallen apart, we have the opportunity to be honest with ourselves and use that honesty to build a future that can save Arizona, and by extension America.

I present this article as an introduction. I hope there is lively debate on this one. I'll be back on this topic in the future. Thanks for slogging through it. If you, Dear Reader, have comments, please put them down. Good or Bad, Love me or Hate me, I'll take it all. If you don't want others to see your comments, of course I can be reached by email: wscotgrey@gmail.com. But, I hope you choose to display these comments. 

Our future can't be decided in vacuum.