Redstate

By corbusier Posted in 2007 — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

My beloved home state has truly turned a new leaf. Having spent my formative years in the Pelican State, I am extremely pleased that the voters of Louisiana have decided to break tradition and vote for a new breed of leadership and imagination as embodied by Bobby Jindal.

Of all politicians, Bobby's background hits rather close to home. He and I happened to have attended Baton Rouge High School, and Bobby was only one class ahead of my oldest-brother. That high school was a special kind of place, an extreme bright spot of talent, ambition and worldliness within the sea of mediocrity that was Louisiana in general.

The consciousness of mediocrity was all pervasive when I lived in Louisiana during the 1980s. As a kid going on into adolescence it became commonplace to talk about the state's descent into the bottom of national rankings for almost every social indicator. Our supposedly poorer next door neighbor Mississippi was a convenient crutch to soothe our low self-esteem. There never seemed to be enough money for anything, from our schools to our dilapidated roads. Bright people were pulling their stakes and heading out of state, never planning to return regardless of how much they would have liked to stay. And news about some crooked politicians seem to never end, to the point that having a criminal record was no obstacle to winning and holding office. State politics dominated media coverage, and it seemed that someone was running for something or trying to bring forward a legislative vote every day. Only when I later resided in other states did I realize how state politics engulfed the public imagination in Louisiana, since local news coverage in Texas, Colorado and Illinois devoted relatively little to the happenings in the legislature.

With no way to avoid the wall-to-wall coverage of politics, I would learn what the Democratic party could do to a charming and beautiful state. I would witness how it had worked hard in forging a culture of irresponsibility and pride in mediocrity. If there was ever a single experience that helped shift my views to the right, growing up in Louisiana was it.

What pained me most about the state was how it would continuously squander its best resource- its people. I was fortunate to attend Baton Rouge's best public schools, where I was surrounded by brilliant students left and right, the children of LSU professors and researchers, the engineers running the Petro-chemical plants along the river. There were many immigrants in the student body, mostly of Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese extraction, many of whom would go on to elite colleges outside the state never to return. Bobby Jindal was one of these hard-working students who represented a potential future for the state, imbued with Asian values of academic success and discipline, yet tempered by a genuine love for their home. Many of them would leave for good, opting to seek opportunities in environments that would reward their extraordinary talents, but Jindal instead took the risk in coming back to tackle the problems of his home state head-on and inject a new standard of problem-solving to governance.

Upon leaving Louisiana to search for greener pastures in Texas, I was filled with regret but also with hope. My experiences in Baton Rough High School made me hope that one day, these amazing young minds I had the luck in knowing would take over Louisiana and kick out the corrupt political establishment that was running the state to the ground.

That day has come.

Louisiana has finally seized the moment. All of us who reluctantly left that state should rejoice, since now our guy is finally in charge.