[magellan]

Originally Posted by michmoldman

Magellan is right on. Seems this person only hangs with the people who they share the same feelings and opinions. These people are actually the ones, who most of us normal people, think are totally out of touch with the real world. Are they really trying to say that if you don't travel, then you are kinda an idiot? I would say that 80-90% of the people in this country do not travel from state to state all that much. Although I do feel a bit like Patrick from Spongebob now.

Haha!

I'm not glorifying mediocrity by any stretch. I just find that sometimes when people say others are "unenlightened", it's just that they don't agree with them and like to put people down to reinforce their own self-aggrandizement.

Are there people in Michigan who are stuck in the past? Certainly. Are there more people in Michigan stuck in the past than the national average? I don't even know how you'd measure that, especially on anecdotal evidence.

I will say that the crushing demise of the auto industry in Michigan is forcing a lot of talented thought leaders to leave the state, especially in engineering and R&D. It's not a culture thing, it's a J.O.B. thing.

[St Starseed]

Originally Posted by magellan

Are there people in Michigan who are stuck in the past? Certainly. Are there more people in Michigan stuck in the past than the national average? I don't even know how you'd measure that, especially on anecdotal evidence.

magellan's point is excellent. The country, and certainly not just Michigan, is full of millions of people "stuck in the past". (rural West Virginia? or rural Kentucky? just as examples out of thin air.) I don't think that makes them "bad people" or "less enlightened" than the stereotypical elites who populate San Francisco or New York, for example. They just, as someone else pointed out, look at the world differently. And quite obviously: Everyone is certainly entitled to their view of the world, and I think it's rare that anyone comes across people whose worldviews are offensively off base or hopelessly out of touch with reality (let's bring back the horse-and-buggy, for example).

What bothers me is when people let their worldviews and "the past" stand in the way of new and good things. And you find this in metroDetroit a lot: people pining for the glory days of the auto industry, or people who won't go to a Tigers game because the money pit of Tiger Stadium was torn down. Of course, there's a lot of value in history (I LOVED Tiger Stadium), but it's good to accept that things change. And it's rare they don't change for the better. We evolve. We improve. We go from dying kids to smallpox vaccines. We go from starving to supermarkets. We go from mainframes to iphones. The UScan at Meijer is here to stay, and to those who say it displaces workers, I point out that the PC displaced a lot of typists and typewriter companies, but that's worked out pretty well for everyone, hasn't it?

Of all the states in the union, Michigan is one of the most ripe for a makeover, and while it's impossible to expect the state to do a 180 is impossible, if there's any time in the last 100 years (or maybe ever?) when the state and its business and political leaders need to be open-minded, now is that time.

Thank you also to the person who pointed out that explaining Michigan is pretty much impossible. You're absolutely right. It's too diverse. Dearborn is not Big Rapids. Perhaps I should have titled this thread "Could someone please explain metroDetroiters to me," but I don't think that would have generated the same interest, so it's worked out.