(no subject)

[urbpan]

"...just when you start getting used to being able to walk down the street without tensing every muscle in your body, you get reports of an incoming blizzard. You brace for it, but instead of snow, it rains for 12 hours and then drops to the 20s, encasing the entire city in ice and gutting your hopes for an early spring.
...It's a killer, but Boston beats out warmer parts of the country in other ways. I'd rather be stuck in eternal winter, for example, than to have to stand for a minute in the company of Creationists and people who think the Blue Collar Comedy Tour is funny."
-Joe Keohane, editor of The Weekly Dig. (our alternative weekly paper, from this week's issue)

Can someone out there please refute this? Not because I don't believe it, but because I do. Must I choose between a comfortable social climate and a comfortable weather climate?

Comments

[wakarusa.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I had to think about this a little bit, and sort through some - until now- unarticulated feelings.

I am often pissed as hell with the people who are running Kansas, and frustrated out of my mind with the people who go along with what they say - because they are scared, in denial, or just don;t want to know. Folks who lack moral courage drive me insane. But am I ashamed to be a Kansan? I don't think so. I am ashamed to be American, though, and I am trying to figure out if this is an inconsistency, or just a difference. I'm not ashamed to be a Kansan because I have such a history here - my family has been here since 1864, off the boat from Ireland. And because my roots here are so strong, I know in my gut that we are so much more than this current evangelical hysteria. I suppose I have always seen this millenial type of thinking as a not entirely unexpected reaction from a population whose roots have been so severed from the land in the past few generations. Folks have lost their grounding - either through losing farms, losing jobs, or losing a way of life to corporate farming - and evangelicals were throwing the only lifelines when this was going on. The rest of the country mostly ignored the farm crisis. Now, of course, there's a lot more to the evangelical movement than the farm crisis, but that's a lot of what I see, living here. Part of the reason this religious upheaval is taking place is because our food systems became so massively fucked post World War II. So I guess shame is not a response for me, since I am so embedded and invested - and, I'm not leaving. This is no time to leave Kansas. The more crazy it gets, the more I know I have to stay.

That said, I can also well understand B's desire to move to France NOW, because being an American is so painful and shaming right now. People - children, civilian populations - are dying in our names. That is never okay. We are being rude and discourteous and dangerous and loutish and inconsiderate on a scale that blows the mind. I am ashamed of that - and maybe the shame comes from feeling I am so powerless as an American citizen. As a Kansan, I feel I have options. And resources. I guess it's all in the roots.