If there's one stereotype that's true about Minnesota, it's that everything is nice. The people are nice, the scenery is nice, the bus drivers are nice, the squirrels in the park share their nuts with you, the wind blows gently in your ear on your morning commute whispering "Boy oh boy, don't you look great today!", the Twins let other, suckier baseball teams win our home games because they don't want to be bad hosts by trouncing them, etc. I would also say that as a people we're a lovably chubby bunch too (though this is off-topic, see Gaby for more details).
That bridge last night must have had parts born in New Hampshire or something, because it was decidedly not nice. No state's people deserve to experience this, and my strange undying home state pride makes me think, however unreasonably, that Minnesotans especially did not deserve this. We're ingrained in our peaceful upbringing to love thy neighbor, sometimes to the detrimental extent of passiveness (when our neighbor is Norm Coleman and should be ousted from office), but nonetheless, we are socialized to be helpers.
I called my high school boyfriend who lives near the bridge around 6:30 and he was on his way down to the site to help people, riding on the bike path that goes under the bridge along the Mississippi. I told him going down probably wasn't a good idea, that it could still be dangerous (New York has beaten niceness out of me), but he disagreed. This morning he called, using his left hand to hold the phone because last night his bike wheel was torn open by debris on the path and he flew over the handlebars breaking his right arm. I couldn't help uttering a nicely worded "I told you so!" but of course his reply was "I just had to go." Nice or dumb, whatever you label that effort, it is undeniably Minnesotan.
What is demonstrably not good-natured is the fact that the Bush regime has spent nearly 400 billion over the last six years on an ill begot war in Iraq while deliberately cutting the budget for the nation's infrastructure.
That is more Cheneyesque-- really really ugly.
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2 comments:
your last sentence is pretty much right on, but i take issue with the rest of your comment. oh, ja, you minnesoters are nice, but we iowegians deserve some credit. i bet there were iowegians who drove up to the cities to help out.
Touche. Sometimes I think I refer to the whole of the midwest generically as "Minnesota" because I'm MN-centric.
You're totes nice!
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