re: Something I just dont understand about California and the Pacific Northwest

California and the broader PNW are the economic engines of the US. Those states contribute far more dollars to the US treasury than they receive back.

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A lot of Navy and Pacific theater vets returning decided that California was the place to settle down for any number of reasons.

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This happens a lot with retired vets. I've lived in the Shreveport/Bossier area for a long time and almost all of the old guys l meet who aren't from La. tell me they had 4 or 5 assignments in the military and upon retiring they decided the Barksdale AFB was a nice experience so the couple retired here.

Your premise falls apart immediately because you’re treating the modern West Coast as though it were a genetically isolated population descended almost entirely from Oregon Trail pioneers. It isn’t.

California and the Pacific Northwest have been transformed repeatedly by domestic migration and immigration. Especially after the 1960s, they attracted millions of transplants, particularly counterculture, while California also developed enormous Latino and Asian populations. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are not collections of pioneer descendants who somehow lost the family “striving gene.”

That is also what posters here miss when they complain about Californians moving elsewhere and “bringing their politics with them.” A huge percentage of those Californians were never from California in the first place. They moved there from Texas, Ohio, Alabama or wherever, stayed for a few years, and then returned home or moved somewhere cheaper.

So chances are those California “freaks” supposedly invading your state are just your freaks returning home, or another state’s freaks making their next stop. I’m a sixth-generation Californian. My four-times-great-grandmother pulled a handcart across the plains with an infant after her husband died only a week into the journey, so I can claim as much pioneer stock as anyone. Having watched entire communities of native-born Californians get priced out while the people replacing them enacted one crazy policy after another, I say good riddance. Keep them this time. We don’t want them back.

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California and the broader PNW are the economic engines of the US. Those states contribute far more dollars to the US treasury than they receive back.

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Why don't they threaten to secede? They would be a utopia.

The PNW has a lot of folks who moved there from California. I guess they brought communism with them.

I have relatives in Washington state who my wife and I visit regularly. We have to fly into Seattle but we’ve never stopped for a second there and have zero plans to. I always wanted to see Pike Place but my relative who lives in Washington state said he wouldn’t feel comfortable taking his family there now so I have dropped the idea.

You get 40 or 50 or 60 miles out of Seattle, into the mountains, it’s a different universe and some of the finest and friendliest people you could ever want to meet. And fantastic local seafood, beer and especially wine and cider.

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The PNW has a lot of folks who moved there from California. I guess they brought communism with them.

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Started in the 70’s when the radical leftists left the Bay Area. Seattle and Portland were still rather conservative cities back then by today’s standards. The 1980’s was the big push to Seattle and the 90’s to Portland once Seattle became almost as bad as San Fransisco to live in rent wise. Many in this time period were white and Asian students who couldn’t get into UC Berkeley or Stanford due to quotas. They went to Oregon or UoWashington instead. Many stayed there.

Those are some interesting observations.one of my very best friends I met while at LSU (huge hunter and fisherman) went to grad school in Seattle. Whenever I asked him about the “loonies” from up there, he said most were actually very nice people. He said everybody generally helps one another out and the way they are works for them up there. He also said their politics could never work down south, but that is due to a large part of our population

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His response: “Don’t.”

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To each their own I suppose I live in a nice suburb of St Louis (lived in the city limits when I was just out of college) and people would tell you to avoid the city at all costs. Sounds familiar to me. Like most places, it’s a neighborhood by neighborhood thing.