I don’t have a blog, or a livejournal, or anything fancy like that; I’m just a lady who gets paid to read books and write papers and teach other kids how to read and write papers. Or at least I’m training for it. So I often read the blogs of my fellow-women in education, and Ms. Lauren’s Feministe is the first on the list.
I could write about all kinds of things: I could add my two cents to the Schiavo national embarrassment, and ruminate on the meaning of law, now that our legislative body has taken it upon itself to legislate for the particular individual, rather than for the “universal,” or for the nation at large. But I won’t. Or I could echo all of the rumblings and ramblings about the sorry state of the Democratic party, still sore from a whuppin’, trying to figure out how to be a party of opposition, and how to strategize a comeback. I won’t do that either, except to humbly suggest that looking beyond the New England corridor will probably help, and I don’t mean that in a “those latte-drinkin, Volvo-drivin, sushi-eatin’ Ivory Tower yuppies just don’t understand good ol’ fashion red state ‘Mericans, with their big trucks and their guns and their churches an’ all.” I mean that I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that establishment Democrats have finished the whole dazed from defeat thing and are ready to really try to be the voice for working people, women and minorities, because the other side certainly isn’t. That’s how to be an opposition party, guys. And next week we’ll introduce universal health care coverage, re-introduce the capital gains tax, and have a talk about proportional representation.
(Oh my God! I’m a woman and I started talking about politics, in my first ever blog entry, EVER. Or are those two mutually exclusive? Help! What do I do now? Don’t blame me; I’m the new girl.)
What I really meant to write about was the Midwest. I love the Midwest. I once visited a friend in NYC, a friend who was born and raised (and put up a hell of a fight for the DNC) in Ohio. I had never seen a map of NYC; in fact, I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know that NYC was south of Boston. It’s true. I would simply go down one hole, get on a train, and come out another hole, where everyone looked just as strangely serene and urbane and thin as they had been before I went in the hole. I couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago, where there were some people who were ugly or poorly dressed and didn’t really care (not that I dress in such a way of course, dear friends), and would walk around with this odd look on their face, as if they had just smelled something really bad, but would meet your eyes and smile at you in the street, strike up a conversation with you in the corner store, or give you directions and advice, welcome or not.
Folks from the Midwest are warm and friendly and even-tempered; they can also be shockingly xenophobic, parochial, and hateful towards anything new and strange. Midwestern small towns can be cozy and charming and safe places where everyone knows everyone else because they all went to the same high school and work the same service jobs for years on end, trading favors between the pizza joint and the bar. They can also be stagnant dead-end towns where those who aren’t satisfied with sameness are treated as pathological and find themselves isolated and stuck.
At any rate, these are my people and to them, and to Lauren for sticking it out with them (and being one of them), I raise a can of Old Style. Now back to my thesis…
-Sina
skramer1@students.depaul.edu