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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: North vs. South (6/14/2009 11:12:40 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: stella41b
Do you identify as a Northerner or someone from the North or a Southerner or someone from the South? Or do you identify as being from somewhere other than North or South? What makes it so?
North or south? Hell, Stella, I don't even identify as an American. I'm just a guy who happens to live in America because he was born here, and if I was born somewhere else I'd probably be living there. Beyond that, Minnesota is the part of America where I happen to live, but only because I happen to have been born 200 miles from here and I like the area so much this is where I seem to keep coming back to. I don't identify as anything except a pleasant, shy man who lives in the woods, spends most of his time alone, and wouldn't have it any other way. North and south can just leave me the hell alone.
quote:
ORIGINAL: stella41b
And how does your culture differ from that in other regions? How do you perceive those from the North and/or those from the South?
As others have pointed out, in today's America the cultural divide does not fall so simply along the lines of north and south. America's become too homogenized. People move around too much now, and they take their politics and their socio-cultural backgrounds with them. Urban/rural and east/west/midwest/deep south would probably allow for more accurate categorizations, but even within those brackets you'd have to allow for northeastern vs. southeastern, pacific rim vs. mountain states, and prairie states vs. industrial midwest. And probably several more that I'm just not considering at the moment.
I often do, however, see regional differences on a smaller scale, such as in comparing individual states. My own area, Minnesota, has a "personality" that's very different than, say, Southern California. People in Minnesota tend to be very reserved, very insular, not very warm or outgoing. On a personal level, they generally live very much inside their own worlds, and don't have a lot of genuine interest in what's going on more than ten feet outside of it. In a way, that's to my advantage, because they generally don't bother me and it's easy to avoid them and mind my own business. But it's also one of the things I like the least about it, because I really enjoy being around a more open, gregarious, outward-thinking environment, which is one of the things I love about California and Hawaii, where I have also lived. The pace moves much more slowly in Minnesota than in other, more urban areas - such as Chicago, or the Northeastern urban megaplex - and there's a very high priority placed on environmental issues here, much higher than in most other parts of the country. Clean air, clean water, open space, and the freedom to get out and live in it is woven deeply into the fabric of our culture here in the Upper Midwest, and that's probably the single thing that's kept me here and kept me coming back for most of my life thus far.
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