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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Then again, that stretch also has Gary.

Having grown up in that area of the Midwest, I largely agree with the author's categorization, except that "people on their way to somewhere better who got tired and decided this was good enough" describes a LOT of the midwest, not just Indiana. Significant chunks of Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri, most of Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska, etc.

If you read the history of westward expansion, "got tired and decided this was good enough" is literally true for how much of the area got initially settled (by white people)

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It's really easy to write off a giant part of the country that millions of people live in as tired (and the implication underneath is usually "backward"), it's also dehumanizing them and makes assumptions about their quality of life when it might actually be a lot better than the people making these assumptions.

Spend some time not just driving through them, and one may be surprised to find plenty of diverse and interesting people that live full lives with rich family and social bonds, reasonably priced housing, ample winter outdoor activities (a lot of people actually want snow because it's beautiful and you can do fun things with it) and plenty of nearby nature and recreation opportunities, which I would contrast less unfavorably than the zeitgeist against the crowded, expensive vagrant culture that tends to dominate the more popular places on earth.

I lived in the area for more than 20 years, have annually visited family living there for my entire life even after I left, and consider myself quite qualified to comment on the area, the people who live there, and their culture, thanks.

I've traveled a lot through the area. I was throughout Ohio earlier this year, spent two weeks in Illinois last year, etc.

If I'm allowed to be anecdotal too I've also spent a decent amount of time in the area, including a visit to Bloomington, Indiana to visit their Informatics school, which was full of very interesting, open people that were absolutely wonderful and invited us into their world for a weekend.

The last night there I had dinner at one of the professors' houses in a very nice neighborhood that was absolutely lovely, and in general I thought it was a solid middle class place to live. If it was plopped in the middle of Silicon Valley it would be considered one of the more bucolic and put together cities in the area. And unlike Greenland, the weather is quite good for much of the year and there are trees.

My personal experience does not match the image of tired, doomed NPCs living in a wasteland that it's painted as in this blog post and in these comments.

University towns are exceptions that the rural and suburban parts of these states largely hate. They are the tiny pleasant exception to the whole that is not representative.

Ann Arbor is a nice town. Bloomington sounds like a nice town. The vast majority of Indiana and Michigan are sparsely populated and full of people who distrust anyone not like them and are not interested in broadening their experiences.

"Got tired and decided this is good enough" is literally true - small town midwest America is full of the kind of people who don't want to travel or experience new things because they're content in their house with their hobby and their 6 friends and trying to do something like understand how to ride a bus is terrifying.

This is not a stereotype. I know tons of these people. I got out of the midwest to get away from them.

Having spent a decade in Portland and a few years in the Bay Area, all I can say here is that I've met these people in droves in both places, and the rural-urban political divide is just as strong in the coastal states as it is in the Midwest. I don't think content people living simpler lives are a thing that is unique to any state or region in the country.

If your experience is different, it may simply be the product of cost pressures. It's easier to have a simple life that consists of smoking weed and playing video games with your friends if you don't have to figure out how to afford an expensive house. And something tells me people in Indiana, even their dullards, could figure out how to ride a bus if they really needed to.

Sounds lke you grew up in the wrong small town, you could say the same about a bad neighborhood in any major city. I get around in the midwest for motorsports events, and there is a critical mass of people who love to meet travellers and love to travel themselves. Maybe it's condescension they distrust?

University towns are a dump of businesses of questionable morals extracting as much as they can from a transient population. They're basically military base towns. And both of those are basically tourism or retirement towns which are almost as bad (source: grew up in one). The difference its that tourism towns and retirement towns get their population voluntarily, without a bunch of brainwashing.

I'll side with the "Indiana ain't bad" crowd on this.

I would assume most of those 20 years were your childhood? How many years have you lived in the Midwest as an adult?

Not the person you responded to, but: I lived in north-central Indiana until around age 35. Family still lives there. And the description: Pretty accurate.

> Spend some time not just driving through them, and one may be surprised to find plenty of diverse and interesting people that live full lives with rich family and social bonds

I would argue that this could also be said to people (mainly from more rural parts of the US) who like to disparage large cities. If we're going to lecture city dwellers about how they talk about places like Indiana, maybe it's worth encouraging Hoosiers to go east or west and experience the vibrant neighborhoods and offerings of large coastal cities rather than just assuming they're cesspools of crime and poverty just because they heard a politician say places like Portland, Oregon, are "war ravaged"

The phrase “got tired “is not referring to the modern populations but rather the people who founded those original settlements in those states centuries ago.

They didn't "get tired", they found rich soil and ample water to do farming and milling, which is what they were intending to find. It's called the bread basket of America for a reason.

Agree: a farmer coming to Indiana having previous farmed in New England or New York would have thought he'd died and went to farmer heaven.

In some places, some people absolutely could not endure the long travels to the West Coast, for example the Oregon Trail was extremely difficult and many people quit somewhere in the middle and settled into those Midwestern states. Yes they did in fact get tired, in some situations.

What was so special about Oregon, anyway, that it was worth a deadly trek across the country to go there?

Wasn't it just that it wasn't yet settled, so you could settle there and claim some land? That implies that Indiana or anywhere else on the way would have been at least as desirable, but someone else got there first.

They farm corn and soy almost exclusively, because those are heavily subsidized by the USG. Most of America’s fruits and vegetables come from elsewhere.

Source: I lived in Nebraska and Indiana.

I thought that was California. Not trying to be argumentative.

The giant parts of the country routinely vote against their own self-interests, and refuse to accept evidence to this effect.

I took a moment to realize there’s a place called Gary, Indiana. And that there isn’t just some guy who is so infamous that he’s just known as Gary.

It’s actually a very famous city, but not for entirely good reasons. For starters, it did in my youth have the highest per capita rate of murder in the United States.

However, Michael Jackson is from there. So there’s that.

> it did in my youth have the highest per capita rate of murder in the United States.

> However, Michael Jackson is from there.

There are no coincidences.

Bunch of murderous psychos going heehee as they murk you smoothly.

Clearly not a fan of musical theater. The Music Man ~~takes place in~~ repeatedly refers to Gary. Ron Howard sings a song called Gary Indiana in the movie version. He’s about waist high in that movie.

Pretty close, but the musical takes place in the fictional town of River City, Iowa and Henry Hill claims to be an alumnus of the Gary Conservatory (class of '05), which is the hook used to launch the song in question.

D’oh. You are correct.

Every guy named Gary is named after Gary, Indiana. Gary Cooper named himself after the town, and then got very, very popular.

Not all, only most Americans. For Brits it's usually after Sir Garfield (spear field) St Aubrun Sobers.

And even before Gary Cooper there were people using it for Gerald (spear power), Gerard (spear hard/brave), and (old) Gerbert (spear bright). It is a cousin to, but believed not historically derived from, Garrett/Garrod. It is unclear whether German/Germain derive from this root or not. It is usually unrelated to Jared (which is usually a Hebrew name, but does have spelling variants that overlap Garrod).

Thank you, I thought this was interesting!

It is known for not being Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome.

Gary, Indiana is still memorable to me 50 years later from when we'd drive through it, handkerchiefs pressed to our faces to block out the terrible smell from some sort of toxic industry. Is Gary still like that or has it been cleaned up?

It doesn't stink much anymore. It's still extraordinarily poor, but this is also Gary:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6196019,-87.2547571,3a,75y,3...

Reminds me of driving through Eureka, California in the early 80s and the overpoweringly horrible smell from the paper mills in the area.

Where did all the effluent go; directly into the bay?

No, there's a pipe from Samoa Peninsula out to the ocean. (Fun fact, they're now using that pipe for the fiber optic cable that's landing here.)

The town's even referenced in Futurama:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qUW1pabZpLE

Illinois has a few rust belt towns as well. Decatur is the asshole of Illinois, with a water supply to match. Though for variety, it smells like old gym socks instead. Corn processing plants are almost as bad as paper mills, and when I lived there it had two, ADM and the very aptly named Staley.

East St. Louis, Illinois would like to have a chat with Decatur about which is worst.

The thing about the middle of Illinois is they consider Chicago to be a separate state and East St Louis to be Missouri’s problem. “Oh you’re from Chicago” is a common reply any time you found out you’re from an exurb. Often said with just a hint of dismissal. That’s not the real Illinois. Nobody talks about Rock Island and Moline (the Illinois half of the Quad Cities) this way, for instance.

Carbondale is slightly better, but I think it’s a notorious party school for very good reasons. Small town Midwest has a saying that “there’s nothing to do here except drink, fuck, and knock over mailboxes”. Most Iowa this is especially true, but Carbondale also gave me that vibe. Also that’s a fucking long drive. St Louis too. Nobody appreciates that Illinois is half as tall as California (not that anyone appreciates how long a trip up and down CA is either).

Indiana is seriously considering annexing much of central/southern Illinois. It’s amazing just how aggressively divisive politics have become in the last 20 years.

They might think they are serious, but they are not. Illinois would have to agree to it, and Illinois will not.

Newark New Jersey just walked into the room. “The armpit of America“.

Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who. This is a happy occasion!

Good enough, but also the abject fear of seeing the rocky mountains rear up from the plains. For someone walking beside a wagon in late summer, a horizon of tree and snow-covered mountains topped with jagged peaks would seem like the end of the earth.

Yep. Even worse, the problem is recursive: a town I lived in for a while growing up, Vandalia, Ohio (a suburb of Dayton, itself not exactly a booming metropolis in this millennium, but I digress) was settled by westward migrants aiming for Vandalia, Illinois - a town in the absolute middle of nowhere that just so happened to be the end of the National Road, presumably because the road builders got bored and/or ran out of money. Anyway, the travelers got bored and/or ran out of money on their way to Illinois, gave up, said "good enough", and named their new Ohio settlement after the place they failed to reach.

The Midwest is many things, but for quite a lot of it, "where anyone really wanted to get stuck" is not one of them.

I’m just praying that your football team was called the Vandals

I regulary watch a youtuber from OH and think it's actually nice compared to NY (crowds, cars, construction sites) and SF (intoxicated homeless people). Yup, the weather sucks for half of the year, there are abandoned Rust Belt industrial buildings all over the place, it's kind of flat, but apart from that, it still looks kinda nice. Also great beer joints, places to bike around.

https://youtu.be/eClMVj9GLAA?si=IxXxgdWfCsGge9yT

After living in a good number of places...

I think the people who have found their "good enough" place to live have more down-to-earth personalities.

And people living in "the best place to live" places or "all the people who do X should live here" places have different personalities (not always good).

Gary is also interesting, though. It used to be interesting for good economic and cultural reasons, then bad reasons. Now it's experiencing some revitalization in the manner of Detroit or Rockford, which might actually make it more boring, though better to live in.

I thought the Indiana aside was odd as an objective assessment, but it worked well as a flavorful bit of travel writing to help me understand the perspective of the visitor to Greenland.

Gary is fine during the day compared to a lot of the surrounding areas because the population is actually fairly diverse. White, black, latino, there are enough of you that it's possible to blend in as long as you dress poor enough. If you aren't into drugs or banging and out during daylight hours and don't flash valuable you'll probably be fine.

Vs. say some parts Cleveland, where I've been robbed at gunpoint the second my vehicle broke down and people noticed I'm not from around there.

Cleveland rocks!

Gary is basically part of the Chicago metro area; it's not characteristic of the run of the state you go through between Michigan and Illinois. You don't see it until after you commit to getting onto the Skyway.

and gary was where michael jackson was born.

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