<p>oldfort: making jokes about cow tipping shows a limited interest in discussing the subject at hand, and an inclination to resorting to silly stereotypes about places rather than attempting to understand them. If you noticed, the topic of this thread is “How diverse is the midwest?” I am not sure how your “proof points” about how great NYC is contributes to the discussion, so I assumed that your interest in sharing them was to present all the many reasons NYC is superior to anyplace else (as others in this thread had been attempting to do).</p>
<p>In any case, I wasn’t saying your posts were disdainful. My comments to you were addressed in the earlier paragraphs of my last post. And I have never seen a deer dressed either, nor do I particularly want to.</p>
<p>sally305 - so you think midwest is the only place where there are cows, and cow tipping is making fun of midwest. Maybe you should get out more. I went to a school upstate New York, plenty of cows and deers there. I also do not see how your chip on the shoulder remark is contributing to this discussion. My remark about what NYC (outside of midwest) has to offer is just as such. You reading into it as it is superior than to any place. Well, that’s your inferiority complex. I don’t have the need to defend where I live, but YOU seem to have an issue about where you live the minute someone talks about some place outside of midwest.</p>
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Nothing of interest to me, but I could see how that may appeal to some people, whether you are living in the midwest, NE, south…</p>
<p>oldfort–people are getting offended because you continue to post about how little there is to do in the Midwest and you are just flat out wrong. This board in general has a lot of very pretentious East Coast families, it is what it is. I’ve run into people that think it’s Little House on the Prairie out here and it’s just amazing how ignorant people can be. I also agree that people from the Midwest tend to have more experience visiting/traveling throughout the country and tend to have a more realistic idea of what the various areas are like. It’s rare to find people from the East Coast that have traveled through the midwest to see that we really don’t have Indian braves running around on horseback shooting arrows at the Covered Wagons traveling down the highways :D.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen a deer being dressed either–but I knew what it was.</p>
<p>Preferring one area over the other is just fine, making large, sweeping generalizations about a major portion of the country that is not only not true but out and out wrong, is not ok.</p>
<p>I understand completely where the poster is coming from!</p>
<p>Our family has lived about 25 miles north of Des Moines for 20 years, because that’s where my husband was offered an academic position. It took us awhile to accept the fact that we’d be living in central Iowa (moving from the northeast US). Until our kids graduated from high school and went away for college, we could always say that “it was a good place to raise our kids”). But now our kids are raised and living out of state and we’d give anything to get out of here. As the poster states, it is completely geographically challenged. Yes, northeast Iowa is beautiful, and western Iowa has it’s beauty (Loess Hills), but central Iowa doesn’t have much. Almost all of the land in the state is under agricultural cultivation, and there just isn’t any “wild outdoors” or much hiking, etc.</p>
<p>Grad school would be the perfect time to check out other locales. So I’d advise identifying the best grad programs for you and then see where they are located and make your choice depending on where you’d rather live. We have lived in very different locales for masters, PhD, and post-docs, some places we’d never want to live in permanently but enjoyed checking out for several years–for example the southeast.</p>
<p>Our son made his grad school choice in the same way: identified the best programs for him and then chose between his acceptances based on location, and of course whether the stipend would totally support him. He loves where he’s living!</p>
<p>Good luck and cast a wide net! I agree with other posters that there are great places to live in the Midwest (Madison, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago), but central Iowa isn’t among them!</p>
<p>As someone who is from the midwest, I wish midwesterners would stop getting so defensive about the region when confronted with patronizing misconceptions. This defensiveness reinforces coastal stereotypes about provincials with chips on their shoulders. The midwest has much to recommend it. Let’s just leave it that.</p>
<p>If you really want to be the object of ignorant stereotyping, be from New Jersey. My Jersey born-and-bred D attends college in Massachusetts. She has to explain to people from California and Virginia that the show Jersey Shore is not, in fact, an anthropologically accurate representation of the state. The only other students who seem to understand this without explanation are the Northeasterners.</p>
Search through this thread, I had one or 2 posts about NYC (my first post was today and this is has been going on for 10 pages), so I don’t know what is this “continue to post” business. </p>
<p>I bet you that I could post something disparaging about CA, Seattle or any other area of the US, and I wouldn’t see that many people getting offended. Based on my post, I said how great NYC was, not how Midwest (or any other place) sucked, why no one from CA or any other place took offense to that? It is ok for sally to say people from NE are pretentious, but not ok for people to say Midwest is kind of boring. That really makes sense.</p>
<p>My first post on this thread was around 10am #126:
I don’t see anyone from Boston or DC jumping down my throat.</p>
<p>I’ll bite. I live in Boston, and I’ve spent a lot of time in NYC, and I think oldfort is right that they’re very different. I do love Boston. Boston has a lot of students, and there are “gritty” parts of the city (Dudley Sq, East Boston) but you don’t see them unless you’re specifically going there. My mom, who grew up in Brooklyn and had two kids in two different in Boston (so has spent a lot of time here) commented that she didn’t think Boston had a lot of poverty and lower economic areas – and they are very hidden. New York is just a grittier city, where you see all kinds of people everywhere and graffiti on buildings in wealthy areas as well – it feels more like a mish-mash. Whether that’s good or bad depends on the individual, but to me, NYC feels very gritty and more unilaterally diverse than Boston. And just huge.</p>
<p>Another huge difference is timing – the MBTA stops running between 1 and 5:30 am. If you’re out late, you’re walking or paying for a cab. Places close earlier (probably as a result). In New York, you can get out and find things that are going on whenever. There are a lot of other differences. Boston’s a great city, but I can see where it could feel small to somebody from New York.</p>
<p>That said, I still maintain that the difference is rural vs Urban. I grew in CT between Boston and New York in a very rural town. We had cow tipping jokes and had to drive half an hour to go to the mall. I know somebody from the midwest was posting about CSA’s – I’m a member of one and have many CSA options to choose from in Boston. I pick my share about about a five minute walk from my apartment. CSA’s have existed in this city for years. The only CSA available anywhere near my hometown started up last year. And I know there are a lot of CSA options in New York City as well. And people who live in or near Chicago are going to be a lot more cosmopolitan than people who live in far upstate New York (my interview at Hobart and William Smith was the definition of provincial) or the northeast corner of CT or western MA. A big city is a big city and a small town is a small town. Many of the adults in my hometown don’t go often to Boston or New York, and when they do, it’s to do very stereotypical touristy – I really don’t think that living in New England makes you automatically NYC-savvy.</p>
<p>oldfort, no one from Boston or DC is jumping down your throat or anyone else’s because the subject of the thread is not “How diverse/wonderful/superior is New York versus the rest of the Eastern Seaboard?”</p>
<p>In any case, you are exhibiting your own defensiveness. Having to expand upon the wonders of NYC–as if people didn’t know already there was more to the city than the theater scene–suggests that you somehow feel the need to justify your own reasons for being there. My (and others’ ) descriptions of life in my diverse midwestern town are 100% relevant to the topic–I don’t know why you would suggest otherwise.</p>
<p>And being tired of having to defend against unfounded stereotypes (as I mentioned pages back, even my kids have had to do this–when they travel outside the Midwest they encounter kids who assume everyone from Wisconsin lives on a dairy farm and eats cheese constantly) does not mean I “have a chip on my shoulder.” It just means I expect more of people who, despite living on the presumably more sophisticated and less provincial coasts, feel the need to make ill-informed and sometimes disparaging remarks about “flyover country.”</p>
<p>Also, FWIW, I am from NYC originally, which I think I stated earlier (but you said you hadn’t read through the thread). I grew up in NYC, Westchester, and then Miami. I am in the Midwest by choice.</p>
<p>I do see some Midwestern defensiveness here. I consider myself a diehard Wisconsinite, and so do my kids, and though people here on the West Coast (and on the East Coast where I’ve lived too) have some preconceptions about the Midwest, we weather those with humor and a smile. My daughter’s friends now can gently mock a pretty good Wisconsin accent, say “bubbler” with abandon, and know what a real brat is. We don’t take offense, we love our Sconnie roots, but we also recognized there really is more diversity in other parts of the country. No biggie.</p>
Why would you assume that people are more sophisticated outside of the Midwest and expected more from them? Is it because YOU feel they are more superior? Don’t put your own issue on to someone else.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why they call Midwest, NorthEast, West,…
Each state in each region is a lot different from the other states.
I am in California but I may kill myself if I live in Barstow or Redding.</p>
<p>I agree that Midwest is a misnomer. I mean if there’s a Midwest then there should be a Mideast, right? When I was growing up Ohio was considered Midwest. And yet Kentucky immediately to the south wasn’t. Go figure. </p>
<p>Is Colorado considered Midwest? Are the Dakotas?</p>
<p>It depends on what you mean by “diverse”. If you mean racially/ethnically…that can vary and I agree with those who say this is more of an urban/rural divide. </p>
<p>I also understand Jaylynn’s point about the midwest being less diverse compared with the coasts as someone who attended an LAC in NE Ohio and took roadtrips around Ohio and parts of Indiana. </p>
<p>I also find it interesting that Chicago keeps getting cited as an example of a diverse urban like NYC. From what I read in the news and several friends…including some White friends have encountered while living there, Chicago is much more racially segregated, has more tensions between different racial/ethnic communities, and a corrupt police force that loves to beat up racial minorities and women whom they feel are “too uppity”. </p>
<p>On the last point…it was so bad one Chicago police commander even tried to blatantly ticket all vehicles belonging to journalists covering a police brutality case to retaliate for their coverage and the DA sheepishly had to publicly state those tickets were invalid and to be dismissed. This just happened a few years ago…not in the heyday of Al Capone. </p>
<p>Heck, in my midwest college town in the '90s, locals were still staring at interracial dating couples, tried to harass students like myself for speaking foreign languages on the street, yelled racist epithets/wanted to start fights on the basis of my racial background, etc. A reason why the college students had some justification for holding the local “townies” in some contempt along with the locals being against our campuses enlightened attitudes towards GBLTQ students/relationships and progressive radical-left political leanings. </p>
<p>To be fair, however, there are also many other areas of the country where you’d encounter such jackasses…including upstate New York.</p>
<p>oldfort, apparently my sarcasm didn’t come through.</p>
<p>Look, I get that stereotypes persist–when I was a college student in Chicago in the 80s, my English grandmother was freaked out that I would be unsafe because of the threat of mob violence. Apparently she was still worried about the stuff she had read about Al Capone in the 30s.</p>
<p>I DO think everyone should get outside of his/her bubble. One of my kids has already left the Midwest for college and the other one is likely to as well. In my opinion, the best way to overcome geographic/racial/other preconceptions is to get to know people from other backgrounds, either through travel or (better yet) living somewhere else outside of one’s familiar comfort zone for a while.</p>
<p>Yes, we lived in Mexico City for 2 years because of my work and just returned back to the States. I traveled to many South America countries while I worked there. My family has also traveled extensively through Europe and Asia.</p>