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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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aving been born and raised in the West, lived in the Heartland and resided recently in New England, I have lived in Blue states simply because I have lived where work took me. My recent brief stint in Texas convinced me I should resolve to spend the remainder of my life not in a Red state regardless of the many times that's where more jobs have been advertised. Yet there's always that tension between work and life where being in a Blue state ensured that daily hassles would be less difficult which has always been made more evident by the marginalization felt in those Red state areas or their enclaves within Blue states. Identity politics are negotiated whether one wants them or not.
OTOH it should be a location-free life path that authenticates one's identity especially with hiring institutions' mania for background and credit checks, aside from the waning need for professional status. But now as things have changed further with some familial set backs I have thought about living simply where I want to, despite the possibility that I will have intolerant neighbors and/or like the joke about yogurt and certain places "at least yogurt has an active culture". So I have returned to my original position, open to the risks of Red state living with a decided preference for a Blue state life.
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here are the states where I have lived and the states where I would like to live, easily generalized however falsely as Democratic and Republican, which because of recreational interests tend to be Red states. Combining work and leisure would be nice if I knew how to enjoy the latter, probably something elusive with the most recent chapter of my life and why I couldn't move completely to Texas, which could have been a good thing had I not been working in a relatively bleak part of the state for not a lot of money nor a lot of job security .
Generally I have lived and worked in Mega-Regions but desire to live more simply in their regional opposites and not because of age or infirmity, but because of expectation and hope however vain. Perhaps my future home will be more like the sprawling meaninglessness of my present exurban life that will be next for me. I've also wanted to become a Canadian, but that option has yet to present itself as time runs out.
This map of emerging "megaregions" in the U.S. matches up snugly with the blue spots on the electoral map:
Electoral cartograms by University of Michigan physics professor Mark Newman show the power of Democratic counties based on population density. Spreading each vote out, his illustrations portray the hidden truth of the conventional electoral map, and why the much smaller number of dedicated blue counties is outmatching the more geographically numerous red counties.
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o, other than the possibility of a windfall or some quirk of fate, I'm stuck in limbo, more likely to live in a Megaregion with recreational privileges in the Red zones but where would you prefer to live in the US?
Today, that divide has vanished. The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants...
The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election were Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, and Salt Lake City. With its dominant Mormon population, Mitt Romney was a lock in the Utah capital; Phoenix nearly voted for Obama. After that, the largest urban centers to tilt Republican included Wichita, Lincoln, Neb., and Boise.
The gap is so stark that some of America's bluest cities are located in its reddest states. Every one of Texas' major cities -- Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio -- voted Democratic in 2012, the second consecutive presidential election in which they've done so. Other red-state cities that tipped blue include Atlanta, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Tucson, Little Rock, and Charleston, S.C. -- ironically, the site of the first battle of the Civil War. In states like Nevada, the only blue districts are often also the only cities, like Reno and Las Vegas.