Swap out “the Twin Cities/Minnesotans” for “Toronto/Canadians” and this article could run in any of Toronto’s alternative newspapers:
The Twin Cities has never been the sort of place where hordes of starry-eyed young people move for fame and fortune. But as it climbs the ranks of every “top 10” list for quality of life, it’s becoming a harder pitch to ignore.
What those lists don’t mention is the frequent insecurity these transplants know well, whispered with confessional despair in wood-panel dive bars after months of missed connections: “Is it just me? Or are Minnesotans total assholes?”
The second-guessing is a common trait. Small-town settlers wonder if they’re just misreading urban chic for frigidity. Transplants alighting from megalopolises like Buenos Aires and Berlin chalk it up to small-city small-mindedness. Folks from the South are quick to blame the isolating cold of northern winters, but that doesn’t explain how those hailing from other Midwest cities have a hard time cracking the icy Nordic shells of native Minnesotans too.
Those born and bred here don’t always see it, but to newcomers we’re not very friendly, at least in a deep friendship way.
It took Jade Ross of Colman, South Dakota, no more than one college party to catch on that “Minnesota Nice” is a trademark best used sarcastically. At 18, when she reported for school at St. Cloud State, everybody talked up the Minnesota Nice phenomena ad nauseum, she says. “I’d never heard of that before, and I didn’t understand why you needed to talk about it,” Ross says. “In South Dakota, we were just nice, and we didn’t need to brag about it.”
At parties she’d describe home as a small farming town of 500. She got responses like, “So do you have … Internet? Do you ride a buffalo to go to school?”
Toronto, since its inception as the Muddy Town of York, has always been small minded and colonial. Diaries of the original settlers are full of that “keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality and enforced snobbery. This is no surprise when you realize that York was founded by a bunch of upper class Virginians and a smattering of Englishmen who now found themselves in a backwater instead of the high society they were used to. That’s what happens when you back the wrong side.
Comment by Wallhouse Wart — October 24, 2015 @ 06:36