Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The fans were bundled up Friday night in Shoshoni. It was 41 degrees at kickoff and dropped to 36 before the game was over. You could hear comments about the cold, see women with their eyes barely visible behind wool scarves, and wearing heavy mittens. It made quite an impression for a mid-October evening.
Jump ahead to late January with the identical conditions and you’ll see t-shirts, shorts and people rejoicing at the sudden “heat wave.”
Why do we do this?
It’s all about perception and it’s a driving force in everything we do, in our day-to-day activities all the way to life changing decisions on jobs, homes and spouses. Perception is everything in how we view the world around us.
We’ve been granted five senses. The combination of all of them, along with a “sixth” sense, our experiences through memory, guide our perception of the world around us.
It’s not limited to just humans, we’ve all likely seen it in our canine companions as well.
How many people do you know who seriously say, “If my dog doesn’t like him, I won’t like him either?”
That’s perhaps an extreme, but there is truth in it.
My friend Geno and I were walking to class one morning on the UW campus. We crossed 15th Street on the corner of White Hall and proceeded up Ivinson towards Coe Library. A pickup truck was parked between the old Commerce and Industry College building and Coe. As we reached the back of the truck a blue heeler jumped up onto the side of the truck and started viciously barking at Geno. He’d evidently been asleep as hundreds of other kids passed by him ahead of us, but when he sensed Geno was there, his hackles went up and he was ready to attack.
Geno jumped back, said a few choice words and the dog remained alert. Just to check it out I asked Geno to go ahead and I walked back to the dog. He laid back down in the truck with his head between his paws and just looked at me.
What precipitated his response? Who knows? Geno is a dog guy. He’s had many black labs since.
Perhaps the dog had a bad encounter with someone who looked, or more likely, smelled like my friend. I suspect the pups’ responses were a combination of his five senses and that sixth sense of memory triggering a reaction.
It’s not just dogs, we do it too.
How many times have you met someone for the first time and hit it off immediately? How many other times have you met somebody and within seconds have decided to avoid them? It goes both ways.
As they say, you only have one chance to make a first impression.
In my case, a first impression in a brief encounter in the Lusk faculty lounge long ago was a correct one. I walked in to get coffee before school and there was fellow science teacher Dave Hamaker talking with a gorgeous blond at the table. I was in there less than a minute, but she made an impression.
Two months later that blond was working the checkout line at Safeway in Lusk. The impression was still there. We were engaged four days later, and we’ll celebrate our 43rd anniversary next June.
That was quite the perception, but she hit all the mental tabs a young man has hidden in his brain when he meets the right girl.
That’s an example of hitting it off immediately with someone.
I’ve got dozens of other examples of the opposite. When I think about them, about the only perceptions I have of people who I immediately don’t like are arrogance, ignorance or condescension. Hit one, you can give them a chance to redeem themselves, hit two or three and it’s time to move on.
With just a couple of weeks remaining until this interminable election season is over, bad impressions are rampant, the people who generate and thrive on them are politicians.
The only benefit to our one-sided, right wing political view in Wyoming is that we don’t have the political ads other states suffer through, we don’t have enlightened debate in our decision-making process, but we don’t have our mailboxes and inboxes filled with political crap either.
Our political campaigning takes place before the primaries back in August. All the mailers, radio spots, pop up ads in social media and political television commercials come during the republican primaries. In Wyoming, if you’re the GOP candidate, you’re in. Even in the national races no one wastes money on Wyoming. Trump and Harris won’t spend a dime or take notice of anything we do out here since we’re such a conservative bastion.
We get Pittsburgh over the air channels at our house thanks to an AirTV device attached to one of Staci and Adam’s digital antennas on the roof of their house east of Pittsburgh. We get over 100 channels from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio through an interface with our SlingTV account.
Suffice it to say, I use the mute button all the time in a Leap Year.
Leap Year, only in America is that extra day always tied to a major election cycle.
Politics, or at least the media’s expectation of our perception of politics is big business. Mud slinging has always been part of the process, especially in presidential elections, but it’s devolved into local elections as well.
On channels out of Pennsylvania, you can watch 15, 22, and 30 second spots of people running for city council, county commissioner, state house and state senate eagerly calling each other names while making wild accusations that only the most ignorant would believe.
It’s all in the perception politicians have of the voters.
Part of us not thinking much of the political hacks is that their perception of us isn’t exactly rosy. We’re just the rubes that they con to get into office so they can make behind the curtain deals and get rich on the backs of the working people.
See, that’s another perception. We can see and hear politicians, but thankfully it’s rare that you can touch, smell or taste them. If you’ve been around the sun a few times, that sixth sense kicks in quickly. You’ve heard this same song and dance from clowns in other circuses before and just aren’t buying.
We don’t worry about these commercials out here. On a national level, we don’t exist.
A tornado rips through a Mississippi town and it makes national news. A mountain, or rather two mountains in the case of Dubois and Sheridan burn down and it barely gets noticed.
The perception of Wyoming is Jackson Hole to most of America, and much of the world.
Let’s keep it that way.
I’ll take those bundled up friends at a local high school football game played against friends and acquaintances from Cowley, really the same small town just 140 miles north of us every time.
As Senator Allen Simpson once said, “Wyoming is just one small town with really long streets.”
That’s a perception we can live with.