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A Rebuttal to the United States of America
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Written by Anonymous
Let’s start off by saying I agree. California’s superiority is evident in its massive debts and self-important attitude about social progression despite Iowa actually having less social regulation. Did you know gays can marry there? How horrible! Thank goodness we banned it. Furthermore, the fact that the age of consent is lower is absolutely
appalling to a teen such as myself. I could never imagine even attempting to engage in anything sexual before the age of 18, even though the age of consent in California is 16. Sure, I love how California is known for its engineers and scientists. It doesn’t matter that the rest of the country views us exclusively as the land of beaches and Hollywood, we’re progressive enough to ignore them completely.
Clearly you believe the third best state award belongs somewhere in New England. While it is obvious you chose the first best state based on California, and the second best state based on New York, it is likely that you are blessed with the knowledge that we are too important to actually know anything about the individual states that make up this second best state. However, to make a humble suggestion, the group of states you mentioned IS commonly called New England, and that might help us enlightened progressives remember this new state.
I also agree with your opinion of Texas. While the state is known for cowboys, you did a brilliant job in calling them what they should be known for, the death penalty. The fact that 35 states have the death penalty, including California (and excluding Iowa) can be easily ignored since we are a bastion of progressivism and they are stupid hicks. I also approve of your coining of “Racism Land.” All their injustice was against African-Americans, and that’s awful. No one could deny that. Luckily, being the progressive state we are now, can safely ignore our past mistreatment of the Chinese, who we not only discriminated against, but actually barred from immigrating to our amazing state until 1943. It’s also fun to call states racist that fought FOR THE UNION in the Civil War. West Virginia, you’re in the South, and that makes you a direct target, no matter your history. Missouri too, despite being in the Midwest. Again, we’re so progressive we can ignore the past!
New York City is for sure the best state also. I know it’s a city, and that New Jersey is directly between it and Pennsylvania, and that there’s a whole state to the north, but it doesn’t matter. We can safely ignore those because Hollywood almost never uses them in movies.
Yes, every state SHOULD be more like California, each of them having their own laws is so unnecessary. The country would just be so much more progressive if gay marriage was illegal everywhere, the death penalty existed in all fifty states, and consensual sex was more restricted. And let’s end it with the knowledge that memorizing 50 states was done successfully by…pretty much everyone at the school. It is part of the standard 4th grade curriculum, after all. That you would consider something that you already learned in 4th grade worth complaining about and less worthy of your time than facebook is a tribute to the superiority of us progressives. You, good sir, are a brilliant young man and I hope you run for public office one day, so I can vote for you. Our country needs more people like you to defend the principles of progressivism from the tyranny of less important states.
See In My Opinion: The United States of America for the original column.
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Photo credit Leah Worthington
WEEKLY CAPTION CONTEST:
January 19th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Hey, not bad. To clarify though:
1. I do basically no research. This is a humor column, not some sort of intellectual treatise. I apologize if my subtle statements like calling for Michigan to be renamed “mitten” made you think it was dead serious.
2. Yes, other states have the death penalty, but as the following link shows, Texas has killed over thirty times as many people as California. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/number-executions-state-and-region-1976
3. Just because the other countries view us as merely beaches and stupid celebrities, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have more. Google? California. Apple? California. Microsoft? Washington, hence my decision to fuse it into the same state as California.
4. I know about New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Frankly though, New York is so cool that I figured more land would give it room to expand, perhaps into a tiny empire of some sort.
5. No hate crime legislation for crimes against homosexuals in West Virginia. Not exactly what you’d call super tolerant. Also, we did commit horrible crimes against the Chinese, we never did, you know, do that whole slavery thing (though, as you say, West Virginia didn’t either. Missouri did though).
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/01/without-protection-anti-gay-hate-crimes-in-the-south-spur-calls-for-better-state-and-federal-laws.html
6. Yeah, you kind of have me on the sexual consent laws. It’s not teens having sex with each other I’m worried about as much as men in their thirties being allowed to take Tiffany to her first PG-13 movie.
7. You got me on Gay Marriage too. Courts here have accepted challenges to Prop 8, however, and hopefully it’ll be repealed.
8. Just because something is part of an established curriculum, doesn’t mean it’s automatically worth learning. Furthermore, seven years is a long time to forget stuff when your mind is distracted with having to memorize new things. If I told you to memorize all the cities of say, Zimbabwe, and I came back in seven years, during which you continued your life as normal, could you honestly say that you would still remember each and every province
9. So California is all movies and beaches because the rest of the country views us that way, but the people who look at Texas’s accomplishments at the same time Google was being invented-namely killing people-are wrong?
10. I like how you fixate on the word “progressive” as how I view myself even though I have as of yet never described myself as such in any one of my three opinion pieces.
11. “The Third Best One” is more suggestive of my hierarchy and sounds funnier than New England.
12. Exaggeration and stereotyping were kind of the point. I wasn’t serious with most of the stuff I said, and I apologize profoundly if I offended you or anyone else. Of course I don’t think everyone in the South is racist, just like I don’t think everyone in California is smart. The article is meant to be amusing and absurd, not taken at face value. Hell, it had to be cut short, so you guys didn’t see my preface wherein I claim bug people will take over Earth. So a whole article to rebuff what is to me a crappier version of an Onion piece seems a little silly. Then again, this comment is also pretty freaking long, so I shouldn’t talk.
Still though, nice to see some debate.
[Reply]
Sam Sexton Reply:
January 19th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Went on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry. Also “province” should be “city”.
[Reply]
January 19th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Just like California isn’t just beaches and Hollywood, Iowa isn’t just corn fields. Completely moot point considering what you’ve already said. The point of the matter concerning racism is that a state with its own racist background probably shouldn’t be pointing fingers at states that fought for the Union in the Civil War.
As for the sexual consent laws, if you’re SUPER curious, the age of 14 only applies if you’re within 2 years of the said 14 year old, therefore say, even an 18 year old and a 16 year old in Iowa can have sex and the 18 year old isn’t a rapist, which is different than many states. I think most people would agree that makes sense.
As for describing yourself as a progressive, your attitude throughout the article suggested you valued the same thing as progressives, whether or not you describe yourself as such then becomes a matter of semantics.
Now, as for not being able to remember the states. It’s not the same thing to ask one to memorize all of the rivers in China or even all of the rivers in California as it is to ask someone to memorize the states of a country. After all, knowing something about the states should be something that you learned in US history, something that I at least took two years of.
Obviously you weren’t completely serious, which is why the rebuttal was written in a non-serious format. If your article was entirely meant as a joke, then I must remind you to include the funny next time. I had no doubt that you didn’t truly believe everyone in X state is X; however, you clearly seem to lack the concern to know anything about them so I have little doubt you feel safe in making some generalizations. Your self-righteousness may have been exaggerated, yet the reasons you mock the states for suggest it was not completely feigned.
In short, columns aren’t internet forums, they don’t exist to see who you can troll so claiming that’s what you were doing is just a lie. If you want to make an uneducated rant about other states in such a public sphere, you should be expected to be called out. If you want to make an uneducated rant and then suggest a course of action based on said rant, you end up looking like an idiot to anyone who knows something about the topic.
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