Minnesota Nice

I'm not a native Minnesotan, but this is my favorite place that I have ever lived. And I am saying that as four feet of snow create a landscape most reminiscent of the ice planet Hoth.

One thing people sometimes wonder about is the almost preternatural niceness of people here. I found people in Texas to be friendly but often not nice. Here they may not be as friendly, but they are more often nice. And I don't mean in a passive-aggressive way, but a genuine way.

In a recent article about Amy Klobuchar in the Atlantic, Caitlyn Flanagan described it very well in the course of revisiting Klobuchar's now-famous dialogue with Brett Kavanaugh:

Klobuchar didn’t take the occasion to grandstand or to showcase her own moral superiority by giving one of the vile little sermons that have become a hallmark of our time. She didn’t even bring up Spartacus. She simply gave the only decent response to a sincere apology: She accepted it. She was no pushover—her questioning about blackouts rang the bell upon which the whole matter turned—but neither did she allow his bad behavior to inspire any of her own.

When people speak derisively about “Minnesota nice,” it’s because they don’t understand the people and the place. It’s not niceness; it’s a form of radical politeness combined with an unshakeable and largely unexamined sense of obligation to one another. Klobuchar knew her family would survive the divorce when she trudged home from a friend’s house the morning after getting the bad news and saw her mother up and dressed and shoveling the driveway. In Minnesota, a shoveled driveway is both a winter necessity and an unmistakable sign to the community: We are okay in this house. If she had been too broken to do it, someone on that block would have surely done it for her. That, too, would have been an unmistakable sign: We won’t let you go under.