WHAT THE FRACK

Dear god.... I need to get the hell out of Kentucky. This is an ad on the back page of the LEO (leoweekly.com). This ad has been running for 3-4 weeks, is not a mistake, an those are not typos or errors that were not caught before publishing.

I would like to thank all the people who commented on this photo for proving my point. There is a lot of good about Kentucky that this California native has witnessed, and a lot that deserves mock and ridicule. Using a pregnant woman wearing lingerie to advertise Bachelorette parties is one of them. The Gun range angle is nothing more than icing on the cake of fail.

The ad people will fawn over this ad, the gun nuts will cry that they are being oppressed and the grammar folk's heads will explode. But there is a much deeper point to be made.

States like Kentucky are falling behind. There is a great potential here to be a leader of the area, a link in the great chain of commerce between the South, Midwest and Northeast. Yet this is the perception to those who do not live here. I tell people that Louisville has a large gay and lesbian community, and they laugh at me. I tell them that Louisville is the forefront of medical research, with some of the best heart surgeons in the world, and they stare blankly at me. I tell them that Louisville is the home of the US hand transplant teams, and they begin to look at the place differently. I tell them about the research done at UofL in relation to organ and tissue transplantation, and I can see in their faces a change in attitude. Kentucky is also the third largest producer of automobiles in the USA and has a larger industrial base than I expected.

Then, crap like this happens. For Kentucky to thrive into the next century and not become a third world nation in the center of the USA, the state and its people are going to have to focus on perceptions. Like it or not, this place has a reputation. That needs to change, fast, or else we will end up like Central Ohio, Alabama, Cleveland, Detroit, or any other city/state that has failed over the last decade because life and the world have changed under their feet.

We can't build a bridge here due to obstructionism, we won't fund schools, we won't work on infrastructure, but boy do we play basketball!

There is something wrong with this, and I think that only mock and ridicule will start to change attitudes. Otherwise, all the smart people will flee to Seattle, Chicago, California, etc.