I am sorry for my whiny ramblings and for assuming it was the silent treatment. (It was actually the Prime Minister.) Here is the beginning of a thought somewhat related to the whiny ramblings. More later, maybe. Now, off to seminar to meet Statistical God Bob Groves. Oooooooh...

An Important Cultural Difference of the Upper Midwest
OR
I Always Wanted to be a Soc/Anth Major But I Never Took any Classes

by Amelia Hoover

Dar Williams writes (the song is "Iowa"), "Way back where I come from, we never mean to bother / We don't like to make our passions other people's concerns..." Now, Dar is not from the upper midwest. She's not even from Iowa. But having grown up there, I think she's kind of hit the nail on the head with that one.

I grew up in a medium-sized North Dakota town, just across the Red River from Minnesota. Depending on which side of the river you called home, you were liable to hear a lot about North Dakota Nice or its twin, Minnesota Nice. Minnesota Nice is how Garrison Keillor makes his living, and apparently North Dakota Nice is how Dave Barry makes his. (He makes fun of us. We throw him a potluck. Granted, it was at a sewage lift station in January, but still.) Nice is distinguished from its Southern cousin, Hospitality, by a respect for personal space that borders on the pathological; it is distinguished from mere Polite by its constant smiling helpfulness. Polite is, one might say (well, I would, at least), a lesser subset of Nice.

Which leads to the aforementioned Important Cultural Difference. When people from other places fail to act nicely (or at a bare minimum, politely), they are having a bad day, or they are stressed out, or...whatever. Whereas, of course, those of us from the upper midwest will generally think that we have done something to make those people hate us. Happens to me all the time. Because, of course, like any number of other cultural practices, Nice means something far larger than, well, nice--to us, at least. It is a way of conveying respect to people you don't know well (and, often enough, to people you do as well), and unfortunately, not being liked is inextricably linked with not being respected. You've been warned: when you fail to smile and say hello to a person from Grand Forks, or to make polite conversation, you have conveyed the midwestern equivalent of an East Coast "fuck you." The message is more than "I don't really like you." It's something like, "You're not worth the effort."

Of course, this little story of Nice-ness is not without its complications. North Dakota Nice is usually reflexive even though it is so meaningful. We like to pretend that it signifies something meaningful, even though, as in most socially conservative communities, people may act Nicely (or at least politely) toward many people of whom they disapprove, or about whom they may privately gossip. Not Nice is reserved for the truly despised, creating a wide middle ground of variable honesty in any sort of social discourse, be it personal, political, or whatever. But at least we all get to feel good most of the time.