As another Arizona native about to leave this state for good, let me give you some advice. Don't make the mistake I made: LEAVE NOW. Arizona isn't getting better. It's getting worse. More old people are moving in. The laws and policies are getting more regressive. The homophobia, racism, and anti-intelecualism isn't getting better, it's getting WORSE.
I spent the last ten years of my professional career here and now realize that I've done lasting harm to myself by staying here. I could have been working with much more quality people in other places, and learning more from them.
Arizona doesn't want us. The old people don't want websites and technology and that crap. They just want low taxes, green grass like in Alabama/Mississippi, and no pesky dark people.
I am am Arizona native. Up until recently, I was working on the largest supercomputer in the state, Saguaro2 at ASU, and a Translational Genomics Research Institute (genomics research) employee. I live downtown right in the creative district, near Roosevelt Row.
I am in the process of selling my home and leaving the state. I am done here. I don't want to live in Arizona anymore. I won't be coming back.
I am now in my 30s and I really regret staying here. I should have left long ago. My career could be so much better and i could have learned so much more by being with my peers in the SF/valley area, Seattle, or Boston. I have wasted a portion of my life here in a black hole where retirees come to die, not live.
I would never tell anyone in technology to move here. There are few jobs and the people you would be working with are mediocre and lack ambition.
Employers like Intel, TGen, and GoDaddy(YUCK) deal with low moral issues. Intel employees over in Portland know that if you get transfered to Chandler, it's pretty much a death sentence for your career. I can rattle off a dozen names of ex-Intel employees who I know shipped in from elsewhere to Chandler and had quit within five years because they hated the local company culture, along with Arizona's culture. TGen has a massive problem with investigators and other senior staff jumping ship because of the "Arizona problem". As for GoDaddy... a morally bankrupt hole of despair.
The outdoors here are pretty great if you are in to that sort of thing... the problem is all the people.
Oh, BTW, of those 128 lakes in Arizona? Zero of them are natural. All artificial. Let's not bring up the water quality of Tempe Town Lake, lest things get gross.
Arizona's many problems with regressive social issues can be directly attributed to it's large retiree population. Or more generically stated, the old people.
Native Arizonans (white and "Native" natives) from places like Wilcox, Safford, Show Low/Lakeside/Snowflake, Flagstaff, and Tuba City are pretty normal people who have lived a mostly rural life. They care about the low desert, the high desert, and the wildlife. They care about schools, kids, ranching, mining, agriculture, and those sorts of things.
The old people, and to an extent the economic transients... they come from elsewhere. They are not from Arizona, and they really don't care about Arizona. Plow the desert, put in new subdivisions, heavily chlorinated pools, and green golf courses. They want to cut or completely eliminate estate and property taxes. They don't care about schools or education and consistently vote to down anything related to it.
The old people stay with their own, inside their own collective conclaves like Youngtown, Sun City, and elder-slums of Mesa, and Apache Junction. It's an "Us vs Them" mentality where the "Us" is white people over the age of 65, and "Them" is everyone else in the world.
Old people vote pretty reliably and consistently, I'm sorry to say, and so they are pretty good about getting their candidates into office. As a result, you've got finger-waving bat-sh*t Brewer, Joe Arpaio, Tom Horn, Russell Pearce and other white weirdos. Let's not forget about Evan Mecham here though... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Mecham.
Is Arizona racist? I'm going to have to admit: YES. The evidence is overwhelming and spans decades. Plausible deniability becomes ineffective at some point, and we are way past there. Countless politicians have showed up on white-supremacist radio shows and been photographed with their ilk. Arizona's war on the MLK holiday was long sustained. The Mexican illegal boogyman talk is everywhere.
Let's be clear that the mass exodus of Mexican nationals across the border into the US is a real issue and I see the real consequences of it on a daily basis (my neighbor just had his car wrecked by a Mexican who ran from the scene because he was here illegally), but the racism part is just what Arizona was already doing before the old white people realized that dark skinned people had been living here before they did.
The Mormon population and their official support for segregation long into the late 70s certainly does not help here either.
Let's see what the kids of good Arizonans, like federal senator Jeff Flake are learning about these days...
I've lived here and I've seen how the old people behave. I don't want to grow old here and become like that. I don't want to have to live with those kinds of people. They can have this state where I grew up. I'm outta here.
http://www4.nau.edu/insidenau/bumps/2008/4_23_08/knau.htm http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=485...