Wild Wonderful West Virginia

I'm really really tired of people who bash West Virginia who have never even been here. The ignorance of hearing jokes about indoor plumbing, incest, dental hygiene, and on and on, as if everyone in West Virginia was straight out of a 'Lil Abner cartoon, or as though we all live in Mayberry. I've lived other places - Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, California, and believe me, West Virginia has no reason to be ashamed. Physically, it is so beautiful here that I can't believe it's also so cheap to buy land. The people are so friendly and helpful, they even stop their cars and wave you out if you are waiting to turn -- most places they gesture with one finger instead of a wave. We have top-notch medical care, golf courses, white-water rafting, rock climbing, more universities than we know what to do with, Hi-tech consortiums, a state of the art FBI facility, a cutting edge forensics degree program, and lots of malls. We all wash regularly, wear designer clothes or not as we see fit, vote in elections, and cheer our football teams on. This IS the twenty-first century, after all; there isn't a whole lot of regional differences left anywhere anymore, with the continued homogenization of culture, the result of TV, the internet, the telephone and national education for even poor old hillbillies in West by God Virginia. I've lived in WV for nearly 25 years; my family lived in WV in colonial times, back when it was western VA, and were farmers with substantial land even through the Civil War, and both World Wars. The bones of these hills are the bones of those ancestors, and I'm damn proud to be here, thank you very much.