Outta here!

To those who wrote letters appearing in last week’s edition of the Star denouncing the Ravalli County Commission’s stance against the state’s inclusion of Syrian refugees while blatantly attempting to guilt-trip naysayers using miscontextualized Bible verses: Your hypocrisy’s showing, luv.
You live in the poorest county in the state, either support or sit idly by while powerful people and organizations keep jobs out of the Valley and hurt struggling families who already live here, and all you can talk about is how we need to “embrace” Syrian foreigners and support their “resettlement” with our tax dollars.
Yeah, and I’ve got a helium-powered digital wristwatch for sale. You interested?
I moved up here from Birmingham, Alabama almost four years ago to start a new life, and it has proven to be the worst mistake of my life, which is why I’ll be – haha – leavin’ on a jet plane mere days after the Star runs this letter. I thought the folks in my home state were backwards, but you guys consistently prove us to be intellectual gods by way of comparison, incessantly spouting your liberal kaka about the “structural integrity of the community” in letters and weighty pronouncements at pointless meetings while ignoring the real problems besieging this community: rampant poverty, drug-abuse and general disparity.
Your food banks run dry, the average annual family income is approximately $5,000 less than the federal poverty level, I can’t find a job where an employer can actually commit to his or her subordinates despite my drive and education … yet the only thing y’all seem to care about is coddling foreigners and promoting “Muslim awareness” as you ride the social-pendulum bandwagon and denounce those of us with legitimate concerns regarding national security as “racists,” “bigots” and “hate-mongers.”
You’re even spreading your whiny, liberal propaganda in local schools. Case in point: I have a niece attending the high school in Florence who was recently docked a substantial number of points on an essay simply because she, appropriately and well within the confines of academic instruction, criticized an “assigned reading” author’s simultaneous demonization of Mexican border guards and coddling of illegal immigrants. Constitutionally speaking, public high school students don’t have freedom of speech, but I’d really hate to think that teachers here are using that fact to their advantage in order to promote their own ideological agendas. Then again, up here, I seem to be surrounded by pompous, high-browed ex-hippy liberal Californians, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised they’re running the schools, too.
Now, I don’t know about the rest of Montana, but Ravalli County sucks. There’s simply no place up here for a college-grad journalist who knows enough about communication science and media-fueled propaganda to make a few educated guesses about how things work in “Big Sky Country.”
Not too long ago, Jefferson County, Alabama – where I was born and raised – filed for bankruptcy due to rampant government corruption, which led to the federal incarceration of several commissioners, as well as the city mayor. We were so famous, “Rolling Stone” ran an article on us called “The Looting of Main Street.”
Yet I’m all but dying to leave this place and return there.
At least there I can find a decent job and not have to worry about petty, Peyton Place politics and driving forty miles in a blizzard to serve up tacos for eight hours to the general public because the Ravalli County powers-that-be won’t allow a Wal-Mart or Costco to set up shop in the Valley (but God forbid we shut out the Syrians!).
At least there I can fully appreciate what I took for granted the first time back home, having already lived in a place that’s somehow worse: a swirling, soul-sucking vortex of economic and personal calamity that echoes emptily across the mountains while the rich “natives” complain about change and how people “hate” Muslims and endangered grizzly bears and grocery stores that don’t carry enough “gluten-free” products.
So yeah, I’m puttin’ on my boogie-shoes, and I’ll be sure not to let the door hit my ass on my way out.
Jason Cornelius
Florence