The heartland use to be called “flyover country” by the elites on both coasts. I suppose it still is. No one in either the halls of Congress or the D.C. bureaucracy has any particular respect for the heartland. The elite media despises us. And don’t get me started on the contempt heaped on us by Hollywood. So, the coastal elites hold their noses high and fly right over us!
Most of us in “flyover country” don’t work in high-rises. We work on farms and ranches and in small businesses on Main Street. In 2016, we were called “deplorable” and “smelly Walmart shoppers.” But when Barack Obama branded us as racist, gun-toting rubes and religious fanatics, saying “. . . they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” we said, “Nope!” And we voted for Donald Trump.
I live in the Southwest, and my state is unique. I think it is the blend of cultures throughout the region that makes the Southwest and her people just different. Our tri-culture in the southwest dates back 400 years. Many of us, regardless of heritage, are bilingual. We have built great cities, yet managed to preserve the architecture, art, food and music that we inherited from our earliest days.
The cultures are particularly well drawn in my corner of the world. In New Mexico, our modern native Pueblo people are descendants of the Anasazi people who were thriving here between 200 A.D. and 1300 A.D. Acoma Sky City is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States, and The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, built in 1610, is the oldest public building still in continuous use.
The Spaniards came to New Mexico, through Mexico, in early 1500 A.D., and Anglo-Americans drifted in during the very late 1700s and early 1800s. Politics in New Mexico are true retail politics. We are large in area but only 2.1 million citizens, and politicians need to work for it! New Mexico is home to the nation’s oldest cultures and the cradle of the nation’s newest technologies.
From the Pueblo ruins at Chaco Canyon to the New Mexico Museum of Space History at Alamogordo, from the charming Santa Fe Plaza to the spectacular Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico is, indeed, the Land of Enchantment.
