This week my wife celebrated her birthday. To be honest, I've run out of ideas of what to get her as a gift, so I figured we'd take a trip. Since we are nearing one of about a month, I figured to go modest and threw a dart at a map. It landed in some spot called Windham in the Catskills area of upstate New York. I did a bit of research and chose a "boutique" hotel (a word which means nothing much). Anyway, the hotel was nice, the town clean and so on.

So, what's the point?

There are some "immigrants" who work in the restaurants there, but on the whole, they are invisible. When I was watching the 2024 presidential election charts, I noticed that you could identify nearly every city in the US as they were nearly universally blue (Democrat). The rest of the country was pretty much red (Republican), even in "Democratic states". It dawned on me that the assignment of parties was incidental - as were their campaign pitches (which were rarely effectively kept anyway). What WAS important was the country is a tug-of-war between densely populated cities, populated by large percentages of "minority" and immigrant groups and rural areas which were relatively thinly populated and had a far more homogeneous population.

What I was taught in school about the US being a "melting pot" was obvious if I just looked at the other students in my classroom, but in many rural areas, this was just theoretical talk which dissipated along with most other stuff "learned" in school as one grew older - especially if one finds entertainment in one of the news silos which reenforces the concept that the cities were leaching your taxes to support those who didn't deserve it. (In reality, at least in NYS, the contribution of tax revenue by NYC constitutes over 50% of the revenue used by the rest of the state).

The form of republic created by the nation's founders does not favor democratic rule of "one citizen, one vote), but rather, gives a stronger" vote to those outside of areas of dense population than to those within one to the extent that it is not unusual for the president to be elected by a minority of the voters (and the same for many members of the House of Representatives when compared to the number of votes others receive across the country.

These facts play into the hands of those who wish to maintain rule of the US by a minority going into the future.

Jeff