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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

The Midwest (you know, parts of it) has one big advantage over the West coast: the people.

Holy cow, it's like night and day. Compare how willing people are to...not even talk with, but just acknowledge you in somewhere like SF or Seattle, to somewhere like St. Paul or St. Louis or Detroit.

The juxtaposition is staggering. On an individual level there's like this universal basic assumption that everyone is a person who has merit, which is totally lacking on the West Coast. Kind of ironic, considering the political differences. But hey, you can go somewhere your vote counts, right?

That might be a controversial opinion, but I've experienced both as a liberal techie, and I call a spade a spade.

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Hm. I grew up in the midwest and I have the exact opposite opinion.

Where did you grow up? I wonder if this is that thing where we see the ugly under-belly of our homes with a clear eye, but see new places with rose-tinted glasses.

Same. There's a facade of niceness in the Midwest that doesn't go very deep. In a lot of more-rural areas, newcomers are viewed as outsiders and kept at arms-length for years at a minimum. This is not to say mid-westerners are unusually angry creatures, they're just not as benevolent as the stereotype implies. Southern hospitality is an even more extreme version in my experience.

Totally agree. Just because someone acknowledges you, doesn't mean anything.

The phrase that gets to my nerves is "bless his/her heart", which I translate to "I <insert long string of expletives> you, but I'm going to pretend to be nice because I have to keep up this stupid facade that society has created"

East Coast, actually; and people are pretty insular over there too, in the Northern parts.

There are assholes everywhere, but in the Midwest at least you could tell the difference fairly quickly; people sort of wore their hearts on their sleeves, I guess.

Try not being white. My wife gets asked "are you Chinese???" by some random every time she's in the midwest.

I don't understand what the parent is trying to convey.

I realise this might sound negative or naive-for-the-sake-of-political-commentary, but it isn't. I legitimately do not understand what the parent says.

I mean, I understand it literally, but the statement seems to me to convey some meaning that I am unable to decipher.

Perhaps it's because I'm not from the US?

Yeah, it's kind of hard to empathize with if you haven't seen ti happen.

Imagine random people coming up to you and asking you "where you're from" and "what's your homeland like" and so on, just on the basis of your appearance.

Especially if you're "from" Seattle and your "homeland" is just like here but with less weirdos treating you like a fucking zoo exhibit.

It's supposed to come across as a polite curiosity, but for many people, it comes across as a "midwestern nice" way of reminding you you're different and don't belong. Or, in the best case, simply annoying and vaguely insulting.

FWIW both intentions and perceptions matter in human communication, so neither side of this possibly miscommunicated hostility is necessarily "right" or "wrong". But swolchok's point stands none-the-less.

You seem to interpret swolchoks comment as a negative, in the sense that his wife doesn't like that kind of question.

That's what I am unable to do based on what he wrote. I am unable to infer anything from it.

Where I'm from, that type of question is never a negative, and everyone is subjected to it in the starting phases of all social interactions.

That's probably why I'm having problems inferring anything from the comment, because it's supposed to convey a negative about something I view as exclusively positive.

It's based on a long history of xenophobia and subjugation; this is the country that sent its Japanese citizens to concentration camps with the blessing of the Supreme court during WWII, and which needed special guidebooks to help African Americans find diners/hotels/gas stations/etc willing to serve them on road trips up until fairly recently.

Plenty of countries deal with xenophobia and racism, but it always feels a little different in the US because as endemic as it is, people do ostensibly agree that it is wrong and strive to call out and condemn it.

At least, I've always thought they did...

Yeah...see, that's sort of the thing.

It's hard to tell if that's a big part of it, but I suspect that it is.

But there also isn't really anywhere that I've found which seems both implicitly tolerant and kind/friendly/open-armed, so...jeez, I don't know. Maybe it still wouldn't be so bad to go somewhere where I'm not the implicit enemy, bad guy, danger, what-have-you. I mean, it hurts; after some point, you just break down when it comes to thinking things that far through.

Very few people in the Bay Area are from the area or even from CA. Many (if not majority) are from other states and countries. And a lot are from Midwest itself. So it is weird from generalize a "West Coast" culture as it is essentially a mix of many cultures including a fair amount of midwestern culture.

>there's like this universal basic assumption that everyone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like me is a person who has merit,

Fixed that for you

Well again, no, I actually saw far less segregation amongst (very friendly) neighbors in the Midwest - in city burbs, I'll grant you, but still.

I'm not going to argue that the institutional and structural problems are better there, but individual people treated each other like people for the most part.

Absolutely. Folks from the Midwest are much friendlier than in the coastal cities.

Sure the people are friendly in St. Paul/Minneapolis, but in my experience it is much harder to make friends outside of work. I guess that's where the saying, "Minnesota nice, they'll give you directions to anywhere but their house" comes from. I've heard this is due to people having a close knit group of friends that most likely hasn't changed much within the last 5+ years.

I've heard the opposite from friends who have moved to the West coast; they found it extremely easy to make friends outside of work because most people who live there are transplants themselves.

I left the Midwest to build a career on the west coast. It was fun and productive, and I made tons of friends. But my god was it refreshing to later move back to the Midwest.

I can see that folks on HN are taking this a bit personally, but in my experience the warmth, authenticity and friendliness in the Midwest is night and day a different world to the west coast.

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