life in south dakota

[backstory: i just took a trip to san francisco, which i will expound upon and image-ify one of these days, but it may not be until next week because i have a ridiculous lack of time in my apt in the next 5 days and may not get to post picture. until then.....]

so i was supposed to take the red-eye back from san fran and arrive in new york at a red-eyed 5:25 AM this morning, but i decided to go standby on an earlier flight leaving oakland at 1:30 pm so i could actually get some sleep last night and remain a normal person. overall, it was a good ending to what had been a bad plan (the red-eye). the new flight was wonderful, sunny, bump-less, full of great tv and snacks which would have gone unappreciated at 3 AM when i would have been trying to sleep. also included in the new flight was me watching the JetBlue flight-tracking screen in front of me, to see us fly over wyoming and south dakota, two states the prospect of life in which, scares me very much.

free association in my mind: "wyoming........dick cheney...hunting...killing people. the screen says laramie....laramie project...killing gay people. south dakota....abortion ban NOW people!!!!"

i had just seen the SD governor's signing of the abortion ban on JetBlue's lovely choices of MSNBC and FoxNews, and it actually freaked me out to be flying at our cruising altitude of x thousand feet (see if i was actually a quality blogger i would have looked up the actual number of feet that we were likely at, but alas...) over South Dakota. I mean, what if we crashed? What if we crashed and I was somehow accidentally impregnated in the ensuing chaos?? Or what if I actually lived there? THAT was really somethign I could not imagine, which is probably why the red-stater's hate us. I mean, I've lived my ENTIRE life in the state of new york. when i venture upstate, it's still to the liberal bastion of ithaca. I take my first actual vacation as a working gal and where do I go? San Francisco!
I mean, how liberally closed-minded am I!

This was the first time I'd been to the west coast of the U.S. and thus the first time I'd flown over south dakota, the closest i'd ever come. and x thousand feet was too close? i don't know.

But seriously, I sort of felt trapped in my inability to do something about the situation because I probably have so little in common with the people in favor of this decision that a conversation would be ridiculous. I usually think I'm a rather open-minded, listening, type of person who can usually relate to people of different sorts even if i don't agree with their politics. I mean barring that we discuss politics in that case....ho hum....I don't know, I just feel sort of useless and unengaged with real issues. Which really makes me not want to move to san fran or berkeley, where I'd be even less engaged with real issues. But that's another post.