Yes, they are 'way ahead of us in civilization. Someone explained it recently: In the beginning, Canada got the French and we got the religious zealots, but Australia got the convicts. Looks like they won.
Arizona is the laughingstock of the nation, both for its bizarrely unconstitutional laws that serve no purpose except to spit in the eye of its enemy, the United States, and [not so funny] success in turning the majority of the state into a primitive autocracy, with the burden of sustaining it for the rich being increasingly loaded onto the working poor.
The very notion of rejecting a 3/4-federally funded organ transplant program while putting a new roof on a stadium that has proven to be an albatross around Arizona's neck, at the expense primarily of people who cannot afford to go there, would be ludicrous if it didn't involve watching students and teachers and parents of young children and people's loved ones die unnecessarily for the amusement of Arizona's rich in its publicly supported Colosseum.
Or turning over state prisons to friends of the governor, to be converted into businesses making profit by increasing the cost of incarceration to the people of the state -- and, it now appears, possibly skimming off a good deal more of our tax money in graft on its way to the pockets of the owner-wardens, while doing a demonstrably poor job that has already resulted in deaths of innocent persons.
When I meet people outside the state, I am loathe to mention I am from Arizona. The mere fact tends to occupy the rest of the conversation with ridicule on the one hand, and demands for justification [which, obviously, I cannot provide] for this state's behavior, on the other.
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The very notion of rejecting a 3/4-federally funded organ transplant program while putting a new roof on a stadium that has proven to be an albatross around Arizona's neck, at the expense primarily of people who cannot afford to go there, would be ludicrous if it didn't involve watching students and teachers and parents of young children and people's loved ones die unnecessarily for the amusement of Arizona's rich in its publicly supported Colosseum.
Or turning over state prisons to friends of the governor, to be converted into businesses making profit by increasing the cost of incarceration to the people of the state -- and, it now appears, possibly skimming off a good deal more of our tax money in graft on its way to the pockets of the owner-wardens, while doing a demonstrably poor job that has already resulted in deaths of innocent persons.
When I meet people outside the state, I am loathe to mention I am from Arizona. The mere fact tends to occupy the rest of the conversation with ridicule on the one hand, and demands for justification [which, obviously, I cannot provide] for this state's behavior, on the other.