We’re just too nice to one another
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
A survey by scientists of Oxford University in England have concluded that Californians tend to be the less neurotic of Americans, but that they are not particularly open or disagreeable.
That surprised some who read the survey, because they had thought Californians were neurotic as could be. It took 85 days to pass a state budget in the richest state in America, after all, and only people who were abnormally sensitive, obsessive, tense or anxious would be so disagreeable they couldn’t come up a plan for raising and spending money to operate the state government.
Many people only know Californians through the state’s internationally influential entertainment industry, or through news stories about people with goofy ideas or lifestyles.
For example, the University of California at Berkeley only recently got around to cutting down a grove of trees to make room for a new athletic training complex because tree-sitters had been living in the trees for years.
In other states — non-neurotic ones like North Dakota, for example —the budgets would have been passed promptly, few entertainers would be known outside their hometowns and the trees would have been chopped down with the tree sitters in them.
But badly handled budget-passing, living around high-powered entertainers and letting tree-sitters impede progress apparently is not a sign of neurosis. Apparently the most neurotic people are the ones who live where tornadoes or hurricanes are prone to strike.
That makes sense to me. The weather in Madera, for example, is so even-handed that we have to make up neuroses as we go along or we don’t have any at all.
