re: Was Louisiana always as bad as it is now?

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I travel the country constantly and I’ve yet to see these meccas of awesomeness people always allude to. Iowa? Give me a break. Bland food and boring honkies. Much of Louisiana is certainly a shithole. But unless you are some broke dick you can insulate yourself from much of the shittyness Louisiana has to offer, if you’re so inclined.

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This guy gets it

Have you ever driven one of the interstates, especially I-20.

It's a freaking shame that right at the Texas boarder you start bouncing up and down.

Have you seen the schools ?

Your answer is yes and no companies will ever relocate to La with Texas so close.

LOL it's not bad at all - that ranking is a joke.

The downfall all ties into the removal of the World Fair Gondolas. Right at the start of base jumping.

Other states offer better public schools, less taxes overall, lower insurance rates (especially car), and better climates.

A good gumbo can be made at home. There are decent weekend festivals in other states (I prefer a decent bluegrass festival in NC or a decent county fair in Texas with good Texas country music over Wayne Toups). For big events like jazzfest, I can always fly in.

Let’s not act like everyone in LA is hitting the gumbo festival every weekend and listening to good music. A lot of people are shlepping their kids to a travel ball tournament in a shitty town, while paying private school tuition.

Man I would love to have a birth state that absolutely kicks arse. Unfortunately people seem absolutely content to have a state that is garbage in so many ways because it has “culture.”

It just seems crazy to excuse everything that is wrong simply because your food is better than that found in the flyover states.

No one cares about education, no one cares about infrastructure. It is a mess.

When segregation happened, a lot of people moved out of the cities.
Education was diminished by lack of tax income and more students.
The lower class moved into and took over most urban areas causing further decline and apathy from the middle and upper class.

It's only been since Katrina that this has started to reverse.

The north having never had reconstruction or desegregation didn't have the same problems.
The cities on the south that did well had niches.

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Was Louisiana always as bad as it is now?

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No. We always ranked solidly in the mid-40s for years, until Bobby Jindal became governor....

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The way our football fans have handed Orgeron is a microcosm of our state as a whole. “HE’S ONE OF US!!!”

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I’ve said this so many times. If you ever want to explain what type of attitude holds La back, use this as your example .
Most in this state cannot handle any criticism of anything Louisiana. They get defensive and pissed off. It’s mind boggling

I never really realized how bad it was until I left and traveled in the military. Before that, I was a 19 year old plant baw and I thought Louisiana was the greatest place ever, and thought people were crazy for living anywhere else. I guess that’s where most of that mentality still comes from.

The people who so vigorously defend Louisiana tend to be the ones who have barely traveled, if at all, and most likely it’s been coastal Texas, the gulf south, and or maybe a bit of Tennessee. Basically other states that have similar issues to Louisiana, although Texas is worlds above us in almost every good category. On good days I like to believe that we’re getting it together, but we’re fighting against a culture that values ignorance and a learned helplessness in Louisiana. We still have a “I’m just a good ol dumb country boy, and that’s all I’ll ever be” attitude in Louisiana and many young people in the state only value getting a GED as quickly as possible and going offshore therefore the cycle continues. I can't really say that the state doesn't have good people because it absolutely does have some. I think many of the older generations truly struggled in Louisiana, and that lack of education was just part of living in Louisiana back in the early 1900s but too many baws today take pride in that and act as if there's some sort of connection to the past for them if they defy education.

The state hasn’t really given the college educated a reason to stay here, and that's why most of them leave. I left but came back but will probably leave again if the state can’t make significant strides. It's very difficult for a new college grad to get a job here, unless it's in engineering, nursing, or welding.

Another huge problem in Louisiana is the insecurity of ‘outsiders’ telling them how to fix it, they take it as someone looking down on them if you try explaining that this way of life is not very good. You even see it hereon TD; someone will say “if you don’t like it, then move and GTFO” which is not an argument for their case at all and only serves to prove how entrenched in ignorance and insecurity the people of this state are.

Do you know the looks I got in college when I told my professors that I was from Louisiana? We’re not highly regarded on a national level. A lot of people legitimately asked me if I had ever wrestled an alligator... not a joke. I never really understood the idiots who say “thank God for Mississippi and Arkansas”. Perhaps that was true in the past, but both states are making changes that are overtaking us. I thought it would take longer but both states have surpassed us and we keep getting further and further behind the back of the pack. We should have diversified our economy, but instead we are essentially West Virginia and oil is our coal mines. The state also should have beautiful scenery throughout; the heavily wooded areas filled with hard woods and magnolias, have all been cut down and replaced with faster growing pines, so logging companies could get wood faster. Once the land has been completely deforested several times, they sell it and it's turned into a crawfish pond. We sold our soul to logging companies for a few quick bucks, and got miles of open crawfish fields in return.

Our wetlands and coastline are really no different; i'm not exactly sure how much of it stems from the oil companies who've pimped our coastline for 30+ years and how much of it is based on the flow of the Mississippi River, but I do believe the oil companies had an impact on Louisiana's education system in the past. They headquarter their operations in Houston, when it should have been mandated that if they're going to use our coastline then they should base in Louisiana. I'm sure some politician got richer for that one. Then, they want to keep the population dumb. It does them no favors to not have a bell-cow they can call on as oil rises and falls. They don't need a bunch of college-educated baws, who can do other things once oil fricks them over time and time again. They need baws who have absolutely nothing else, guys who will take their layoff with a smile and go sit at home with their F250 parked out front, and hope the offshore company calls to take them back before they have to go work in West Texas or sell the truck that Jason Aldean told them to buy on Craigslist.