Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

summary

I live in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. To be more specific, I live in Reston, Virginia – a planned community. This is a good place to live, have a family, find good jobs, good medical care, good entertainment, and so on. Just Google for “Reston 50 best places” to find all the best places lists that Reston has made.

Alas, I don’t live in RA – Real America. In RA,

• a corporation doesn’t cut the grass alongside the roads
• the roads aren’t repaved every other year
• there aren’t more doctors and dentists than, well, than anything
• there aren’t so many Federal government employees
• there aren’t so many companies whose lone customer is the Federal government
• there are dollar stores

Given time, I could make the above list much longer.

For much of the 28 years I worked for the Federal government I,

• was in a foreign country
• was in California

Neither of the above are in RA either.

RA is sometimes called the “flyover” part of the USA. People flyover it while going from one important place like New York or Washington to another important place like California.

I lived much of my life outside of RA because that is where my job was. I much prefer RA over the other places. Perhaps that is one reason why I enjoyed taking a walk and visiting the Grand Canyon this year and other such ventures into RA.