RickSat lighting up from back in the trees.

I have lived in North Carolina almost all my life. It is a beautiful state, and a wonderful place to live. Within a four hour drive you can go from the eerie mists of the Great Smoky Mountains to the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. You can lunch on sweet, catsup based chopped pork barbecue for lunch in Hendersonville, and chow down on a grilled grouper at the Oceanic in Wilmington, all in the same day.

Between the mountains and the beach... well there isn't a lot to talk about between the mountains and the beach. However, when you leave the big cities and venture out into the rural blue highways and small towns with names like Waxhaw, South Fork, Smithville, and Troy, you realize how rich the land is, especially in the fall when the leaves explode in a vivid palette of color for the brief instant before they shed their foliage and go dormant for the winter.

I live back in those trees, in a house on top of a hill, with a western-facing front porch. A hardwood forest filled with white oaks, poplars, and beech marches right up to our back deck, and stretches back down a ravine to a creek. At the height of summer, I can lounge on the deck and never see another house. Right now, our deck is piling up with leaves. The cats tiptoe through them cautiously, and look plaintively at us through the windows of our den, until we come out and sweep the accumulated leaves from their water dish.

At the front of our house, I can look to my right at the pond and horse farm that were there long before we moved in. In front of the house is a pine forest, with red-tail hawks circling and swooping and diving at small prey.

I have a hard time leaving the house these days to go to work. Within three minutes' drive, I begin to encounter yard signs for Republican candidates, still standing three days after the election as a sort of smirking gloat. I don't see many signs for Democrats in the town where I live. The price I pay for living in paradise is that I have to coexist with people who are content with bulging bank accounts and empty souls.

It is all too easy to look at the electoral map, take in the wash of scarlet states, and presume that there is no support for Democrats in the south. On the other hand, here in North Carolina we elected a Democratic governor and both houses of our legislature are Democratic. How could we go so wrong with the national offices?

I would suspect that it has something to with the uptight, straight-laced, button-down mentality in our banking-dominated big cities like Charlotte, where you aren't even allowed to paint your chest and take off your shirt at a Panthers football game because it offends the wine-and-cheese crowd in the skyboxes in Bank of America Stadium. Just as Wall Street cheered when Kerry conceded, the business community in Charlotte and other large North Carolina cities went all woody over the Bush election. The hell with illegal wars and body bags and raping the Alaskan wilderness - we get more tax cuts! Whoopee! So what if Bush will go back to Crawford in 2008 leaving behind a SEVEN TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT - that's our kids' problem. Screw 'em if they can't take a joke.

I know, however, that beyond the urban banking and marketing blight, there are people good and true, who are concerned about people other than themselves, and who realize that you can't finance prosperity on a credit card economy forever.

I also know that life is circular, and everything comes around. Someday we'll sober up from our Wild Party, and come to our senses, and get back to the business of taking care of one another.

Until then, though, I'm pretty blue in a red state.

Gotta boogie.
R