"Papers, please. I'll need to see your papers."

I shouldn’t eavesdrop on people’s conversations. On one of my flights home from Aruba – the Miami to Dallas leg – I was sucked into the conversation of the three people behind me. I’m gonna name them.

Cyrus was a native of Texas. I think you know what that means. In addition, I believe he was the distant cousin of Larry the Cable Guy. Or maybe not so distant.

Opal was a vacationing school teacher from Arizona or Nevada. I couldn’t quite figure it out. Where ever she’s from, it ain’t Phoenix or Las Vegas. She was wearing wire-framed glasses and a turquoise tye-dye jumpsuit to match her turquoise jewelry.

Clive was a globe-trotting product manager for Perry Ellis, who apparently handles the licensing for a bunch of Nike products, living in downtown Los Angeles and working in Irvine. Clive is from Cleveland, Ohio. As I learned from the Drew Carey Show, “Cleveland Rocks!” Drew Carey, however, lives in Los Angeles.

The threesome spent about 45 minutes talking about how horrible Los Angeles is. They started, at the suggestion of the Texan, with the air quality of all things. While Los Angeles air in the heat of summer isn’t pristine, it certainly can't be much worse than Houston. And as someone who is smart enough to live near the beach, I can testify that our air isn’t that bad at all. Only those idiots who live inland really see the brown stuff up close.

One needs to ask why is our air quality poorer than say a city like Cleveland or Dallas. Two things are at play here: 1) a lot of people want to leave here so its congested and they want to live here because it's a cool place to live, and 2) those really cool mountains that give us lots to do like hiking and camping and skiing trap the bad stuff in, unlike say in Texas where it's flat as shit for hundred of miles with no diversity of view!

Naturally, any criticism of Los Angeles has to include the traffic. Clive is losing it with the traffic. Of course, he’s chosen to live 70 miles from where he works, but clearly that is the fault of the city planners – and I am assuming the planners of all 100 or so cities he has to commute through on that journey.

I have spent some time in Portland, Seattle, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. Everyone single on of these cities has, by my experience, traffic as bad as or worse than Los Angeles. It’s what you get when you live in a city.

I will not tolerate people from Cleveland, Texas and somewhere in the middle of the desert ripping up Los Angeles. My home isn’t perfect, but it is nice. It’s definitely the most diverse city in the country, and for some of us blue-staters, that’s a plus and not a minus. There is a lot of opportunity, whether for your career or your Saturday afternoon plans.

But what amuses me most about these types of people, the LA-haters, is that if the city is so horrible then get the fuck out! We don’t want you here. You are just using up our thick, brown air and overpriced housing. You’re clogging our slow-moving freeways and filling up are vapid, useless nightclubs. And for every one of you that “want” out, there are probably ten that want in.

It’s not communist East Germany. You can move freely around this country. Try it. Get out!