New Jersey Has It All
Football and Delaney Hall
We have a former senior Senator in prison. We have the remains of the pos in the Whitehouse’s first wife buried on a golf course. We have Bruce Springsteen. We have the Statue of Liberty’s ass facing us. We had Richard Nixon and L. Ron Hubbard, both Navy veterans, summering in Bay Head. I could go on but won’t.
The battle for New Jersey is never ending. Our psyches are impossible to wrangle. We are very difficult to assemble or disassemble. We like pizza, tacos, and grow tomatoes. Some will grill a goat, and some will roast a pig. Others go crabbing and boil them alive. We eat clams and oysters raw. This is who we are.
We coexist. Some of us would prefer a less diverse state, others immerse themselves in the breadth of cultural choices we endure. We do not see ourselves as superior, in general, but there are assholes everywhere, including here.
I speak for the fishes as much as I do for my fellow New Jerseyans: sadly, too few of them give a damn about wetlands, rivers, bays or the ocean. Every acre of Pinelands we lose daily to ignorant, greedy, want-to-be Kushner slum lords, saddens me.
But worse are the “professionals” who make those deals happen. Each little town and township has them. The will of the people who grew up in these places means nothing to them. A detention or data center, strip mall, or signal family subdivision is always on the drawing board, just waiting for the right politics to propose them. What was wet and protected today can change with the raise of a few hands at a planning or board of adjustment meeting. There are few farms left in the garden state, but there are tens of thousands of feet of warehouse space ready to be let, and even more coming, you can be sure of that.
In New Jersey we can warehouse humans and host the World Cup without the majority giving much thought to either. That is how dense we are.
Some of us care.