Last week I went to New Mexico.

As you stand atop a mountain and see golden light of sunset illuminate other mountain tops across a wide desert valley over one hundred miles long, well, I agree it deserves to be called The Land of Enchantment.

However, as you go through its many small towns, you also see great poverty. Old gas stations seem they’ve been boarded up for decades. Main streets that thrived in the 1950’s look like ghost towns. Maybe there’s an antique shop or coffee shop that’s open, but, you can easily see that the economic vitality that supported the original construction of New Mexico’s small-town buildings is long gone.

What caused this?

I mean, I see this small-town decrepitation in other states. Arizona has it. California has it.

But not so much in Texas. Going from New Mexico to Texas is like going from Mexico to the United States: there is one helluva’ difference in wealth. Seriously, small West Texas towns, for example, have John Deere dealerships with 50 tractors on sale, with all of them worth well over $100,000. Maybe such a dealership is in some eastern New Mexico towns, but nowhere near the same number like in Texas. Not even close.

Going out on a limb, I do dare say the politics of New Mexico is the culprit. It’s a blue state. You cannot disassociate the poverty and hellholeness of blue areas from the ideology of modern liberalism. Only the economically illiterate do. After all, modern liberalism is just authoritarianism masked as compassion. In essence, it’s no different than communism, and communism only destroys. The free-market – freedom itself – makes people soar.

In spite of Texas’ many rules which I don’t like – and there are a lot of them – it still promotes entrepreneurship fairly well. It invites business to relocate there. It has no state income tax. It’s a freer state. That’s why so many conservative folk from Commifornia are leaving that hellhole too.

Of course, New Mexico, as of February 10th 2022, still had a mask mandate for indoors. Nowhere in Alamogordo did I put it on, probably because of the conversative element there resulting from a large military presence. (Alamogordo’s where I took the below billboard photo by the way.

LOVE IT!

However, in Silver City, well, let’s just say I gave a couple people a piece of my mind before walking out of some establishments. Idiotic liberals. I can’t imagine how infuriating Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos would be.

The bluer the area the more authoritarian it is. The bluer the area, the more poverty there is. Period.

The Land of Enchantment deserves better. I wish I could say better things, but the imagery of poverty in my head is strong.

Well, ok. White Sands National Park outside Alamogordo is neat. There’s not many places like it. (However, I got more of a kick from the Let’s Go Brandon billboard outside the park than the park itself.)

At sunset

There’s also a ton of cool Ancient Puebloan stuff there. A friend showed me Three Rivers National Monument, which has a smattering of petroglyphs north of Tularosa, and Gila Cliffs National Monument, which are some reconstituted ruins located in utter isolation on the West Fork of the Gila River, which flows out of the Mogollon Mountains.

Just some of the photos I took. The two right ones are from Three Rivers NM. The far left one is from Gila Ruins NM.

And, those mountains west of the Rio Grande which give life to the Gila River are gorgeous. Again, that part of New Mexico is isolated. Seriously, look at the map of the Gila National Forest. That’s huge area of wilderness. There’s not a lot of people living around here.

This image captures about 200 miles of land from eastern Arizona to western New Mexico. That’s a huge swath of ponderosas. Hidden all over are Ancient Puebloan ruins, like at Gila Bend NM north of Silver City. And, though the roads through these mountains can be tortuously curvy, they still provide magnificent vistas.

Thus, I will go back. God took his time in making this part of his Creation. Again, New Mexico deserves better than the impressions of the land its government-created poverty can put in the minds of visitors.