7 ms·

Can I rant for a bit, as a Midwesterner? Perhaps in line with this article: my perspective having grown up and remained in perhaps one of the most emblematic mi

Can I rant for a bit, as a Midwesterner? Perhaps in line with this article: my perspective having grown up and remained in perhaps one of the most emblematic midwestern states, Minnesota: 1. We rest on our laurels a lot and look down on the Southern States for having been, "racist," which really is a red herring for our own racism. "Look at what happened down south in the 1960s, thank goodness Minnesota was not like that." "We're never going to give back the 28th Virginia battle flag from the Civil War, Minnesota will be free forever!" Yet, the Twin Cities has perhaps the largest education gap in the entire United States between black and white Americans. There are any number of explanations for why this happened, perhaps including redlining, or failed well-intentioned policies, etc., but it's a fact. I'm not defending actual racism in southern states in any way, but clearly we have something wrong here. 2. We're extremely patriotic, perhaps even more so than Texas, there are Minnesota iconography everywhere, extreme pride for all things Minnesotan, lake country, living through the cold, Sven and Ole jokes, etc. Yet there were literally almost approaching Nazi-level genocidal parts of our history which are reflected in our flags, our naming conventions, where Native Americans live, and a huge majority of people refuse to acknowledge this because it's not nice to be controversial and talk out of turn or, "be distracting from real issues." You can go to Berlin and see huge museums acknowledging the holocaust, the horrors of the past are widely acknowledged, whereas here in Minnesota I was never taught about what we did in our history, it was highly glossed over in primary school, I had to learn about the shenanigans a lot of the early Minnesotan leaders whose names adorn our streets and counties pulled through Wikipedia. 3. Overall, the disgraced Radio Personality, Garrison Keillor hit the nail on the head when he said, "All the Women are Strong, All the Men are Good Looking, and All the Children are Above Average." As much of a creep Keillor was, that really sums up a large part the mentality very well. There's no need to improve because we're already so great, and if we aren't that great in that specific way yet, we will surely get there, so don't push on it too hard. We basically think of ourselves as a, "Scandinavian-level-democracy country," for some reason, yet, please pay no attention to any number of typical American problems that we have just like any other state. This is not to say Minnesota doesn't do well, and that I don't like Minnesota, we do rank well in relation to other states on a lot of metrics---it's more the mentality that I'm ranting about which I think prevents us from doing even better, which I think the author is getting at in a more broader geographic sense.

JohnClark1337 3y ago
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ElevenLathe 3y ago
I've lived all over the US (including the midwest) and it's the same everywhere: the message is that /our/ arbitrarily-shaped state has a unique and amazing culture, and if you don't like it you can move to ${our_major_sports_rival}. It's an easy way to move merchandise like bumper stickers and beer koozies, and a low stakes thing to incorporate into a (consumption-based) personal identity: wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt is a noop in contrast to wearing a hijab, which is possibly a quite dangerous thing to do. This kind of thing (e.g. lawn signs that say rude things about other college football teams) is mainly harmless IMO, but the real deficiencies you've identified are true of all of North America (Canada and Mexico included). It's not Minnesota that has a vastly inflated sense of its success as a liberal democracy, it's the whole continent. Americans have phrases like "manifest destiny," and "American exceptionalism" that speak to this. I can't speak to the specifics of how this works in Canada and Mexico, but I know it does. It's not Minnesota that willfully ignores the centuries of horrifying genocide and slavery that underlie our every footstep, it's the whole continent. Any attempt to inject a little more verisimilitude into the stories in our school history books (the most recent notable one being the 1619 Project) is rabidly opposed by white supremacists who eventually "compromise" with actual history by adding a sidebar or a separate few chapters about the middle passage or Algonquin culture /without/ ever actually stating the central point that /the purpose of America always was, and functionally still is, to enslave and steal from black and native people for the benefit of (historically exclusively white and male) elites/. Again, this is a USA-centric view but my understanding is that similar dynamics play out in Canada and Mexico.
- wwwpatdelcom 3y ago
  Florida, California, Texas, New York, and to a certain degree the unique states, Alaska, Hawaii, do have, "something special," about them due to their sheer size or uniqueness. What does Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan have? They need to be really attractive places to live because they aren't inherently (though some parts are, they are really far away from population centers). People don't go on, "vacation to the Midwest," they go to other, better landscapes. I'm sure there are outliers and I know there are outlier locations, I'm speaking in generalities here. I have driven over a significant portion of the Midwest, it's few and far between. You can't arbitrarily make beautiful mountains pop up in Iowa, and it's cold. At least if you're in Arkansas, it's got the Ozarks, warm weather pretty much year-round. So really the only thing we midwestern states can do is look deeply inward and improve ourselves, that's really the only thing, other massive or more interesting States can rest on their laurels for a bit because people are inherently going to want to move there. Can you tell I'm not running to be the Governor of Minnesota any time soon? ;-)

JohnClark1337 3y ago

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ElevenLathe 3y ago

I've lived all over the US (including the midwest) and it's the same everywhere: the message is that /our/ arbitrarily-shaped state has a unique and amazing culture, and if you don't like it you can move to ${our_major_sports_rival}. It's an easy way to move merchandise like bumper stickers and beer koozies, and a low stakes thing to incorporate into a (consumption-based) personal identity: wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt is a noop in contrast to wearing a hijab, which is possibly a quite dangerous thing to do. This kind of thing (e.g. lawn signs that say rude things about other college football teams) is mainly harmless IMO, but the real deficiencies you've identified are true of all of North America (Canada and Mexico included). It's not Minnesota that has a vastly inflated sense of its success as a liberal democracy, it's the whole continent. Americans have phrases like "manifest destiny," and "American exceptionalism" that speak to this. I can't speak to the specifics of how this works in Canada and Mexico, but I know it does. It's not Minnesota that willfully ignores the centuries of horrifying genocide and slavery that underlie our every footstep, it's the whole continent. Any attempt to inject a little more verisimilitude into the stories in our school history books (the most recent notable one being the 1619 Project) is rabidly opposed by white supremacists who eventually "compromise" with actual history by adding a sidebar or a separate few chapters about the middle passage or Algonquin culture /without/ ever actually stating the central point that /the purpose of America always was, and functionally still is, to enslave and steal from black and native people for the benefit of (historically exclusively white and male) elites/. Again, this is a USA-centric view but my understanding is that similar dynamics play out in Canada and Mexico.

wwwpatdelcom 3y ago
Florida, California, Texas, New York, and to a certain degree the unique states, Alaska, Hawaii, do have, "something special," about them due to their sheer size or uniqueness. What does Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan have? They need to be really attractive places to live because they aren't inherently (though some parts are, they are really far away from population centers). People don't go on, "vacation to the Midwest," they go to other, better landscapes. I'm sure there are outliers and I know there are outlier locations, I'm speaking in generalities here. I have driven over a significant portion of the Midwest, it's few and far between. You can't arbitrarily make beautiful mountains pop up in Iowa, and it's cold. At least if you're in Arkansas, it's got the Ozarks, warm weather pretty much year-round. So really the only thing we midwestern states can do is look deeply inward and improve ourselves, that's really the only thing, other massive or more interesting States can rest on their laurels for a bit because people are inherently going to want to move there. Can you tell I'm not running to be the Governor of Minnesota any time soon? ;-)