Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

Two Years a Husker - 10/26

By Rich Trzupek
  October 2022 marks two years since I’ve left my native state of Illinois to settle among the farms and ranches of Nebraska. It is, within a lifetime filled with personally stupid and ill-considered decisions, perhaps the wisest choice I have ever made. “The move” hasn’t just kinda worked out, it’s been spectacular.
  When you do the math, me and my bride have cut our overall tax burden by more than half. The cost of living is considerably less, even factoring in Bid-inflation. Most of all it’s really remarkable to live among amiable people once more.
  I never thought about how sullen, resentful and downright disrespectful so many of my fellow Chicagoland residents had become. Not all, by any means, but a bunch. It slowly became more and more the norm, but it never occurred to me that there could be another norm until I became a Husker.
  This realization, I have since found, has been part of a realization of people who have departed the deeply liberal big metropolitan centers like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in hopes of finding a bit more sanity in places like Nashville, Louisville, Phoenix and even little-old Lincoln, Nebraska.
  My liberal – but always loved – nieces and nephews protest that Lincoln is hardly red. In fact it’s quite blue! What a hypocrite am I!
  I get it, but there’s blue and then there’s BLUE with neon flashing strobe lights. Lincoln is a mid-sized urban area and it’s a college town. The combination of those two characteristics ensure it will be a Democrat stronghold for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean it’s a liberal, woke paradise. It’s not.
  Lincoln pays due tribute to the gods of climate change, but that hardly bothers me. Those gods are pretty impotent in my view and all more the so when discussing any public policies that do not include the Peoples Republic of China.
  What Lincoln doesn’t do is to participate in defund the police nonsense. When the 2020 riots hit my new hometown, the chief of police made it clear that violence and vandalism would not be tolerated and – go figure – the angry mobs dispersed.
  What Lincoln doesn’t do is to participate in the Soros-funded “no cash bail, even for violent offenders” programs that has resulted in notoriously ignorant and prejudiced people like Kim Foxx and George Gascon getting voted into public offices in which they are supposed to uphold the law to the best of their ability. This crop (aka: crap) of Soros-funded flood of district attorneys and prosecutors have shown no interest in enforcing laws, only in generating results that happen to coincide with their personal version of justice. They are not servants of the people, they are slaves to an ideology.
  It is striking how people in Lincoln, and really in every part of Nebraska it has been my pleasure to visit, almost universally look you in the eye when they talk to you, are more than willing – anxious – to exchange pleasantries and who pay more attention to the person they are engaged with at the time than they do to their cell phone. I’ve even got a native Nebraska nephew, mid-twenties, who always takes off his golf cap before he settles down for a meal. That’s amazing.
  Is Nebraska perfect? Of course not. No place is without fault. But it is so, so much better place to be at this time in history than Illinois that I can hardly imagine any circumstance that would induce me to move back to live within the rotting corpse of my once great state. The cynical machinations of the Mike Madigan crowd and the spectacularly naïve ignorance of the Pritzker family have combined to create state policies and programs that I fear will result in Illinois becoming the first blue state to spiral beyond the point of no return, both in terms of lawfulness an in terms of economic reliability.
  I sincerely hope and pray that the “Safe-T” Act results in a more prosperous, welcoming and secure Illinois once it comes into effect in 2023. If it happens not to, and if the powers that be are unwilling to alter Illinois leftward lean, I hope you’ll at least consider a move red. The water is just fine.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com