Sometimes five points of fakeness just doesn't seem to be enough. As such, here's five more reasons that Minneapolis needs to get real about itself. You can spell 'Minneapolis' without 'hypocrite', but that doesn't mean the two aren't connected.

1. Entitlement

Everybody in this city seems to think that they deserve everything they've got and just a little bit more. We even passed laws to legalize and liscense people to panhandle. Every offramp in the city is crowded with people carrying cardboard signs telling me that god loves me and that I should help them out with just a little money. I can't walk down Lake Street without someone telling me how their "car broke down - just trying to get a couple bucks for gas" or "just trying to catch a bus home". I've dealt with a lot of panhandling in other cities, but nowhere else do the people get so indignant when you don't want to give away your money. It doesn't stop at money, either. I can't light a cigarette in downtown without a couple of people immediately wanting one. What's mine is mine, but the people around here just can't seem to understand why I don't want to alter that arrangement.

2. Cosmopolitan and Accepting

Anyone from Minneapolis will be glad to tell you about how racism and sexism and any other related ism are all very rare in Minneapolis. We're a melting pot of so many cultures, they say. But this city hasn't melted at all. Nobody thinks of Minneapolis as a hotbed of social divisions, but they are there and they are strong. This city may keep promoting itself as somewhere that everyone can get along, but there's still a black area of the city and a Hmong area of the city and a white area of the city and a gay area of the city. And those borders don't often get breached. All these insular little neighborhoods that make up the city and everyone's too afraid to cross over. Even downtown, where mixing of people is at its greatest, the divisions still exist. There the divisions are vertical rather than horizontal of course. The privileged walk through the skyways while everyone else is down on the street. Those walkways were designed to shelter Minneapolitans from the cold weather, not from people who are different than them.

3. Environmental Concerns

We're lucky that Minneapolis really does have some of the cleanest air around. But are steps taken to preserve that air? Everyone drives everywhere in this city. The quickest way to go any distance is to take the freeway, after all. The mass transit in this city is a frequently bankrupt joke. It's going to be a while before we end up like Los Angeles, but we're moving towards that while LA is moving towards us. After so many years of knowing we have it good as far as the air quality is concerned, we barely pay attention to it anymore. One day we're going to wake up with a purple haze hanging over the city and wonder just how it got there.

4. Holding our liquor

Minneapolis hasn't had bars open past 1am for very long. But it seems like even that "late" 2am closing time might be too much for a lot of people to handle. I won't go out on the roads anymore at 2 in the morning, and I try not to walk around outside either. Every night - especially the weekends - the streets are filled with people who can't calmly hold their booze at this hour. Downtown lights up with people wandering around trying to remember where they parked (as if driving was a good idea in their state). I've seen closing time in other cities, and the people were rowdy, but nothing like this. The whole city of Minneapolis is still reacting like a teenager who finally got their curfew extended. Suddenly they can stay out to what they consider late and they're making every use of it. Maybe the teenager that is Minneapolis wasn't quite ready for a later curfew.

5. The News

Every town likes to think that they've got the best journalism around. Whether it's the round the clock fires & shootings & drug busts of Chicago or the far more sedate "here's a cute puppy to end the newscast" that we get here, everyone thinks that it's the best thing going. Well, I don't know where the best journalism is being done, but it sure as hell isn't Minneapolis. The less that's said about our 5, 6 and 10 o'clock newscasts the better. Every night we get the same three current events stories and then as much advertising as they can cram into the rest of the newscast and call it informative. The newspaper isn't much better. The Star Tribune, like all newspapers, is failing. And they're not doing anything to hold the ship together. They changed the layout of the paper last year in an attempt to raise sales. All it did was confuse people who had been reading the Variety section for years. And our free papers are no better. The City Pages - long held as the top free weekly in the cities, is 95% advertising these days. When I pick up an issue it takes me only a couple minutes to read Red Meat and maybe one article that actually interests me. I just hope they're recycling all those unread issues.

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The whole city of Minneapolis is still reacting like a teenager who finally got their curfew extended. Suddenly they can stay out to what they consider late and they're making every use of it. Maybe the teenager that is Minneapolis wasn't quite ready for a later curfew.

Some of the popular bars in Uptown have become a big annoyance for the neighbours. Every morning around the bar closing time, you hear those drunks making noise on the street. The bar goers park in the residential areas to say the parking fee for drinks. Those quieter drunks still wake people up when they start their motorcycles or cars. Drinking late at night is one thing, not knowing how to behave is another.

My hubby is black and our experience is that there are more people here who are willing to give him a shot, but there are alos tons of people who are horribly racist. (Mostly middle aged white women who think they're so freaking hot that any black man faced with her beauty will fling away family and home in order to rip his suit and tie off and order to assult her.) Combine these oxygen wasting troglodytes with "minnesota nice" (ie pansy passive agressive behavior) and the people who are willing to give hubby a shot find it easier to let the racists run roughshod over him than confront and discipline them. My husband was pushed out of his last job by a redneck who made it clear that he felt my husband was out of his place (he works in upper middle management) and wasn't showing proper defernce to his "superiors". The job before that there was a woman who when she found out she would be reporting to him marched into a VP's office and screamed that there was no way she was going to report to "that nigger". She quit, got home and regretted not having a job and was welcomed back by the company without another word about the incident and proceeded to be as difficult to work with as she could make herself for my hubby (there were a ton of women and a couple of men like this at that place, but this is the most extreme example). We've had neighbors who refused to speak to us. My husband once came into the house in tears because the little girl next door ran away in apparent terror when he said "hi" to her - who knows what her mother had been telling her. Anyhow, MN is better than some places, but FAR from a racial nirvana.

rebeccat wrote:

We've had neighbors who refused to speak to us. My husband once came into the house in tears because the little girl next door ran away in apparent terror when he said "hi" to her - who knows what her mother had been telling her. Anyhow, MN is better than some places, but FAR from a racial nirvana.

Sorry to hear that rebeccat!!! If you think it's bad here in the Twin Cities, just drive 100 miles up north, or 100 miles east or west - it can get a lot worse. Even if you are white, but not parts of the inbreeding family trees, you are just as bad as an illegal Mexican.

Most people in Minnesota never travel, even within the US. All they know are the cold winter, snowmobile, cheap beers and marrying their cousins. Most foreign-born people choose to stay in the coastal states because they are more accepted there.

Frasier wrote:

Some of the popular bars in Uptown have become a big annoyance for the neighbours. Every morning around the bar closing time, you hear those drunks making noise on the street. The bar goers park in the residential areas to say the parking fee for drinks. Those quieter drunks still wake people up when they start their motorcycles or cars. Drinking late at night is one thing, not knowing how to behave is another.

The amazing thing about this? It only happens in Minneapolis. Every other town in the country? Never happens. God, Minneapolis, why do you hate America?

Wooooooooow. I just went through the rants in both threads...(btw, why are they sticky?)

Umm...Just about everything complained about Minneapolis is about 10x worse in Tulsa, a city who's population is about a third the size of Minneapolis. (Technically Tulsa city has a larger population that Minneapolis city, however I'm including suburbs. Minneapolis/metro at just shy of 3 million, Tulsa/'metro' just shy of 1 million.)

We're not perfect when it comes to racial harmony. But what state is? It sucks that rebeccat's husband can't say hi to a little girl without her running away in terror. (Personally I think it's because he works in upper management. Those people radiate evil. j/k ) But from her post it sounds like it's an interracial marriage. How do you think that interracial marriage would be like in hicks-ville Tulsa, where even black people are cruel towards interracial couples.

How about our clean air? Yes we drive everywhere. Yes our public transit is a joke compared to the east coast. Seriously though. Live in Tulsa. They don't have ozone alert days. They have an ozone alert season. Up here we call that season summer. During the summer in Minneapolis there are a few days every couple months, sometimes every month, where you have to worry about the poor quality of the air outside. Living in Tulsa in the summer you will go for a couple of months without seeing a break in days where you shouldn't breathe the air.

Holding our liquor? Are we the only city with rowdy drunks? Did I miss something?

Crappy journalism? ... Where do I even begin with this one?

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Every offramp in the city is crowded with people carrying cardboard signs telling me that god loves me and that I should help them out with just a little money.

I have seen 1 since I've been back from Tulsa. But in Tulsa, they were everywhere. Not just downtown, (though the homeless do run downtown starting at 5:30pm. I'm not joking. It's their city starting then. Get the hell out.) but all over the entire city. Even on the outskirts of the city. I've never had anyone come up to me with a tale of woe until I moved there. Then I was hearing a sad story every week when I'd fill up my car at the gas station. (I'd have to fill up my car a lot because, unlike the Minneapolis/metro area, Tulsa doesn't believe in highways that go anywhere useful, so 95% of the driving is in-city.)

I'll grant though that manners in this city are atrocious. I don't know where Minnesota Nice came from, but it sure as hell isn't Minneapolis.

I can't say that I've been yelled at for bumping in to someone. I've had short conversations with people after bumping into them about what's going on in the world and whatever else came to mind. Maybe we were headed to the same place or something.

I like all the cheap, crappy beer comments. You don't like Summit? It's not my cup of tea, but I'll drink Summit willingly. I'll eat my gun before I drink Buttwiper or Milldew. Want to guess what's popular in Tulsa? They take pride in their Budweiser and Miller. In fact, I was severely let down during my first, and only happy hour in Tulsa when I found out that 1/2 priced American beers excluded all my favorite American beers such as Sam Adams and Killians, and really only applied to Bud and Miller.

By the way, did you know that the shots of the prison in The Green Mile are shots from the St Cloud prison? *jab!*

Anyways, all of this doesn't make your complaints about Minneapolis invalid. What I'm really trying to get at is the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. There are places that have better racial tolerance than Minnesota, or more famous people than Minnesota, or something that's better than Minnesota. It doesn't matter where you go though, there's always going to be somewhere better.

Personally I like living in the Minneapolis metro area because while we may not be perfect at any of the things we pride ourselves at being good at, we're working on those things. I think they're coming along nicely. A lot of my friends like to make fun of our light rail line and how it pales compared to Boston. Every time they do I mention that Tulsa has something like 3 bus routes, and buses stop running at like 8pm.