One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State

I am from New York (the state, not the city, thank you very much), and I have never bought into the "red state vs blue state" rhetoric, because while NY generally goes Democrat, my home county rarely does. If you are looking for conservative values and viewpoints, look no further than large amounts of ostensibly "blue" states, particularly Western and Central NY. I had to stop reading the letters to the editor in my hometown newspaper for this very reason.

But I had never realized, before moving to Indiana, that even a lot of my conservative friends (and yes, I do have aplenty!) are not that conservative by the rest of the nations standards. For example: I was hanging out with some friends last night, and one said that she was at work earlier that day and one of her coworkers said to her, "I don't have any contact with liberals." [the obvious response being, "you work on a university campus, I think you probably have."] Instead, my friend said, "you're talking to one now, actually." He stared at her for a minute and then said, "how do you people even believe what you believe." We agreed that we have never had that happen to us before, maybe because lately she and I have been living in "bubbles" of liberalism--me in liberal-arts-land and Brooklyn, and her in San Francisco and Boston. It was very odd.

Odder still is the fact that I realized a few months ago that I am not close to anyone who is Baptist. Of course there are Baptists in my hometown, but none of my friends really are. I said as much to my friend from Tennessee (we had been talking religion), who looked at me in wonderment. "It sounds like such a magical place you come from," she replied. "Everyone I know is Baptist." Is the United States really that ideological segregated? Are the political maps true? I hope not. It's like how commentators say, "oh, New York, that's not where real Americans live." Nonsense. I encountered the same ideas about "real" American stereotypes (gun-toting, religious, self-indulgent) in England--my flatmates were initially so dubious about my political leanings that they thought I was secretly Canadian, or that because I was from NY I was, certainly, connected to the mob. (Once we got talking, they got over that pretty quick. In fact, my proudest England moment was that in one of my flatmate's classes, someone was slagging off Americans and he turned to them and said, "I'll have you know that I live with an American and she happens to be lovely.")

But anyway, perhaps what makes the quasi-Midwest so different from what I am used to is the prevalence of more conservative religion. The billboards here can be pretty scary, re hellfire and damnation and such. The march last week on the Planned Parenthood in town was very religiously focused. When we crossed the state line for the first time, I texted a friend, "Just passed a 30 foot cross, 3 megachurches and a reaaally anti-choice billboard. Question: what am I doing here?" (her response was "Answer: Getting an education, apparently of the life variety.") And yet, religious activities are a huge part of my hometown too, and they are not a bad thing. Here is my guess: conservatism, in this neck of the woods, revolves a lot around religious belief, whereas for a lot of conservatives that I know, it does not. Case in point: I was talking to a friend about being in a class on globalization with a passel of rather awful Hobies (or Brobarts, if you prefer) who were smug and certain of their position in their father's real estate business or law firm or whatever (direct quote from one: "things really went to hell when women started getting MBAs"; I did not know what do), and she said that the people in her classes (at a state school in Southern Illinois) would always bring up abortion and gay marriage in class, which is something that never really happened to me.

Another example: Sex Education. I have never thought of my high school as a very progressive place, but in terms of sex ed, we apparently are. My friend from California had a similar experience. Her sex and drug ed classes were facilitated by students, so people could be really honest about asking things. I just remember my health teacher bringing in all sorts of contraception and explaining them. Awkward, yes, but effective. My friend from Tennessee, in contrast, said that her sex ed consisted of "a three hundred pound man who spoke like Foghorn Leghorn, lecturing us on the spiritual connection between a man and woman." My high school didn't, as far as I know, ban books. I suspect that it is hard to be openly gay in high school for many reasons, but people were in my high school, and as far as I know it didn't really matter. As recent news stories have shown, this is not the case everywhere.

In another vein, it is a total stereotype that New Yorkers are angry and impatient people. However--people are nicer here. I'm serious. I thought it was a myth. My friends and family are nice people, so it's not like I'm not used to it, but even people at the grocery store here are more polite. I had a 3 minute conversation with an older man last week about cheese while we were at the deli counter--this sort of thing happens all the time in Brooklyn, but not really in my hometown. The first time I was reintroduced into a room of NYers, it was a bit of a shock. I was catching a train from Chicago to Rochester before Christmas, and the train was 2 hours late, and oh, people were angry. This is the NYC mentality that sometimes rears its ugly head. As we stood in line waiting for a train to board to Detroit, one of the conductors came over the loudspeaker and said, "New Yorkers! DO NOT get in the line yet, or you will end up in Michigan. And if you are trying to go to New York, that would be a bit of a shock. You don't want to go to Michigan, do you?" To which the guy next to me yelled, "Who would WANT to go to Michigan, EVER?" And as I laughed, with everyone else, I thought, "these are my people." Early on last semester I was waiting for a bus and went and stood in the street, hands on hips, to see if it was coming. One does this in Brooklyn all the time, but apparently you don't do it here, because I turned around and everyone looked at me like I had just descended from a UFO. As I climbed onto the curb, one of my friends hissed, "what are you DOING? You could have gotten hit by a car!"

I still live in a liberal bubble, but it has plenty of other currents too. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. I can acknowledge when good points are made by someone whose beliefs I may not share, as long as they are not hateful. I don't talk about my political beliefs with someone unless I know them quite well (although I bet you can deduce where I stand, from this post!) and it is interesting to see the differences here, political, religious, or otherwise. And ultimately, the similarities.