Searching for the Spirit of the Midwest
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:<p>1. We rest on our laurels a lot and look down on the Southern States for having been, &quot;racist,&quot; which really is a red herring for our own racism. &quot;Look at what happened down south in the 1960s, thank goodness Minnesota was not like that.&quot; &quot;We&#x27;re never going to give back the 28th Virginia battle flag from the Civil War, Minnesota will be free forever!&quot;<p>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&#x27;s a fact. I&#x27;m not defending actual racism in southern states in any way, but clearly we have something wrong here.<p>2. We&#x27;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&#x27;s not nice to be controversial and talk out of turn or, &quot;be distracting from real issues.&quot; 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.<p>3. Overall, the disgraced Radio Personality, Garrison Keillor hit the nail on the head when he said, &quot;All the Women are Strong, All the Men are Good Looking, and All the Children are Above Average.&quot;<p>As much of a creep Keillor was, that really sums up a large part the mentality very well. There&#x27;s no need to improve because we&#x27;re already so great, and if we aren&#x27;t that great in that specific way yet, we will surely get there, so don&#x27;t push on it too hard. We basically think of ourselves as a, &quot;Scandinavian-level-democracy country,&quot; for some reason, yet, please pay no attention to any number of typical American problems that we have just like any other state.<p>This is not to say Minnesota doesn&#x27;t do well, and that I don&#x27;t like Minnesota, we do rank well in relation to other states on a lot of metrics---it&#x27;s more the mentality that I&#x27;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.