"Heartland Values"

Personally, I'm sick of journalists and politicians fawning over the people in the "Heartland" like they're the salt of the earth and know how America should work. Horseshit. This statistic ...

Stolen from Fez. Click to make big.

... is just one of many in the "values" department where my decadent, East Coast elite state leads. We have a lower teen pregnancy rate than most and a lower divorce rate as well. We have a lower rate of abortions too.

If you think the people in "flyover country" have more "moral values" than we you'd be mistaken, if you're inclined to follow these things. We here don't really care about who's more moral or not as long as they do the right thing. I'm tired of my state being maligned by untruths. I know about my people. I've seen them under strain and pressure and I have seen the best in New Yorkers. I'll put our East Coast "decadence" up against any Jesus-loving "Heartland" state, using any "moral" rating system you want, and bet we'll come out ahead.

Instead of spreading bullshit about how "moral" we are and our "values", we practice our values every day. There are 8 million of us packed in a small space and if we didn't respect each other it would be a war zone.

We don't expect our politicians to be "godly", we just expect them to have our best interests at heart. We don't look at people from out of town (or another country) as "The Other" because they are us. We are The Melting Pot and we still welcome others to enjoy what we have. We don't chase them away. We know that if we take pride in our communities, the crime rate will go down. We know if we give our children a proper education about sex and contraception, they will generally make the right choices when they become sexually active. We know that if we are attacked by terrorists, we will continue on and become better, not arm ourselves to the teeth and abdicate our rights to the government for some feeble feeling of "safety". We survived the worst attack on American soil, we are the targets, and we have become better. We don't let 9/11 rule our lives.

We have more people in a hundred mile radius of my home than a lot of these "Heartland" states do combined, the ones who the politicians and journalists rely on to form their talking points. Tell ya what. Instead of showing up at some diner in Podunk, Wherever (Pop. 25), why not show up at a place on Long Island, or New Jersey, or Connecticut, or Upstate New York? You'll learn about values and you'll learn about the real Americans. You know, the ones who ain't all white and Evangelical Christian. You know, the ones who subsidize the "Heartland" with their tax money. You know, the 8 million who've learned to live together in relative peace without fear of anything that's different.

We are America and I'm tired of being referred to as a place to be tolerated instead of learning from what we've done here over the past 250 years. We ain't perfect, but we're far more ready for the 21st Century than the "Heartland".