By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… I spent four days last week in Mountain View, Wyoming. It is a small town outside Fort Bridger, Wyoming, another small town. In fact, there are four or five small towns in the area.

I like small towns and I really liked my stay in Wyoming.

A Wyoming bumper sticker reads: “Wyoming is what America was.” It appears there is some truth to that statement. There is a feeling of freedom and independence among the people. The fascist state regulatory atmosphere is not there.

Unfortunately, for Nevada in recent years we have been invaded by the influence of our over-regulated neighbor to the West. Many in Nevada seem to believe there is merit in copying the debt, crime and welfare-ridden state of California.

I would suggest that we might use the State of Wyoming as our example rather than the weird neighbor to our left.

Just a note: the City of San Francisco, not wanting to discriminate against nudists, has made it legal to walk the streets naked. They did set down some rules for those who chose to go nude in the city. They must carry a cloth to sit on in public places. I am not sure where they are to carry it and I will not speculate. However, I digress.

It is interesting to note that there is one Senator for every 280,000 persons in Wyoming. The Nevada Senators represent 1,350,000 each. The Senators from California represent 18 million each. This makes the Wyoming citizens the best represented in America.

If Wyoming was a country, it would be the largest importer of energy to the United States. Each year Wyoming produces 10.76 quadrillion BTU’s of energy for use in the state and throughout the United States. This energy comes from coal, uranium, natural gas, oil, and wind. This is only scratching the surface of its potential.

Wyoming operates with a balanced budget and has $15 billion in the bank. Now I understand that states are required to have a balanced budget but if you look at Nevada’s, California’s and many other state budgets, the balance is an illusion.

The unemployment rate in the state is six percent. However, the governor indicates they are working to improve it. I would suggest that Nevada would do well to forget the budget breaking ideas of California and send a delegation to Wyoming to bring back ideas to return Nevada to the State it once was.

One of the advantages of Wyoming is the lack of governmental interference in everyday life of the citizen. I actually saw kids riding bicycles without looking like some medieval knight in body armor. The parents of these unprotected youngsters, had they been in California, would have been charged with child abuse under the child molestation laws of California.

We attended the rendezvous at Fort Jim Bridger and ate buffalo burgers from a stand that had no hand washstand and the workers wore no plastic gloves. The health police of Clark County would have gone nuts! I have a feeling our Pomegranate Festival could have used our local juices and sold home produced jellies had they been there instead of here in Clark County.

I guess people in Wyoming can decide for themselves if they are willing to run a health risk. We certainly ate food from the local booths as well as drank homemade root beer being produced on site. We did not die.

Our local community could learn a lesson from the producers of the rendezvous and maybe we could build the Pomegranate Festival into an event on the same scale. Over a five-day period, well over thirty thousand people came to Ft. Bridger boosting the economy of the small town. They camped in period tents and cooked over open fires. Children played in the creek and people collected water from a communal pump.

There were a great number of participants at the rendezvous that were in period dress. There were four or five who thought they should depict early native dress and the breach cloth nearly qualified them for San Francisco. While small in number, these participants drew a stare whereever they went.

Interestedly enough, they seemed not to be Native-Americans, merely wanna-bes. The real Native-Americans there were well covered in animal skins. Of course, that would seem logical for Indians who lived in the cold country of Wyoming and the surrounding area.

Can someone explain why those who choose to go scantily dressed are always old wrinkled guys rather than young models. I have come to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship as to the amount of clothes one should wear and the age one attains. I am now at an age where a large amount of clothes is a must.

I found the Fort itself interesting and will return one day when the clutter of people is gone.

Now before you all write and tell me if I am so enamored with Wyoming why don’t I move there, let me give you eight reasons I prefer Nevada: September, October, November, December, January, February, March and April.

Let me further state that I really love living in Nevada and have for forty-five years. I regret only that we seem to want to become East California and I am not sure where the advantage to that is. I believe we may be building the border fence along the wrong border.

I see my state becoming more and more like California and that is like watching a cancer grow. As the two major metropolitan areas grow in the state, we move more and more to the welfare states typified by large urban areas and that is, as I see it, a tragedy.

When we lose the independence and individuality that made Nevada unique, we will become just one more slave on the federal government’s plantation. The fact that the feds own nearly eighty percent of the state makes us dependent on forces outside the people of Nevada’s control and rather than trying to move away from that control, we seem to be embracing it.