I left a lot of really great friends when I left Ohio. I had no idea who I would meet in Boston and if I would make new friends. To be honest, New England doesn’t exactly have a reputation for producing the friendliest of people. Most of my perception of New England was based off of watching Indian’s/Red Sox and Cavaliers/Celtics playoff series’ on television while growing up. After moving to the area I realized that I was stupid for judging an entire region based off of its sports fans. If everyone else took my approach the civil war would be an ongoing, ever-evolving conflict.
I have a trip planned in August that will finally pair one of my good Boston area friends with my best Ohio friend for a weekend of golf and booze. I am extremely interested in seeing how they interact. Knowing the two of them, it should be profoundly hilarious. On one hand, my Bostonian friend is an ex-marine, wise-ass; on the other hand my Ohio friend is arguably the most self confident human being since Howard Hughes and has the absolute worst impression of the Boston accent imaginable.
One bad rap that Boston get’s a lot is with regards to its roads and traffic and highway system. Whatever sort of horror stories you have heard on this topic are absolutely true, if not worse than whatever you’ve heard. There is no possible way to know round about when you will arrive anywhere in the region via automobile. Fifteen minute trips can and often do turn into hour long trips. If FDR could have seen what has become of his Interstate Highway System idea in New England, I think he would have just pulled the plug on the whole thing.
But most things that make up a “reputation” couldn’t be further from reality. People are certainly different here but just as friendly, if not friendlier then where I come from. And the people would probably be even more friendly with better roads. People are just as passionate here about their sports teams as in Cleveland with the exception of the Red Sox. People here, love the Boston Red Sox like Clevelanders love the Browns. I have always seen Cleveland as a city where somewhat of a subculture of folks love the Indians but here everyone loves the Sox as part of their birthright, much like Clevelanders with the Browns. This passion for sports has played a key role in my ability to fit in with people here.
People here are, I think by nature, somewhat wise-ass, which helps me. I come from a very long line of wise-assed culture where it would have been impossible to survive without such a skill.
Here, people have a history of having played hockey and baseball whereas in Ohio Football is the religion. And to be honest I always considered hockey to be sort of weird and silly until I went to a Boston Bruins game and realized how closely the atmosphere in that place resembled that of the Dog Pound at a Browns game. If Cleveland ever has the opportunity to get an NHL Franchise, they should do everything they can to do so. It is hands down the most exciting professional sport outside of the NFL.
I do miss my family. Since I moved here, my sister has had a baby boy and now has a baby girl on the way. My inability to be a part of their lives weighs heavily on me but I do what I can for their birthdays and holiday’s. Some days, I feel like I abandoned my parents. But I talk to them often enough and they have never given me the impression that I did anything of the sort.
I also owe a lot to my girlfriend. Generally when a girlfriend introduces you to her friends, it becomes more of an obligatory errand, however, in my current case, nearly every single friend of hers that I have met, with the exception of one guy I pushed across a bar on Halloween, has been awesome. She has surrounded herself and subsequently me, with some of the most down to Earth, funny, intelligent people I have ever met. When left to my own instincts, I generally tend to surround myself with the, let’s get as drunk as humanly possible and fight someone crowd but these folks are much classier and I love her for introducing me to them.
Nobody from where I come from wants to hear it, but Cleveland could learn a thing or two from Boston. Unfortunately I think most Clevelanders are like me prior to me arriving in New England. The first thing that pops into a Clevelanders head when they think of Boston is C.C. Sabathia getting shelled in the ALCS, at Fenway, with the entire crowd chanting “over-rated”, basically allowing a snapshot of 30 thousand people mold their impression of this enormous population center.
Clevelanders also, and I was certainly guilty of this prior to moving here, think that everyone in New England sounds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting when they talk. Well they don’t, there are areas where these accents are more noticeable but for the most part everyone speaks normally. I have noticed that the really thick accents are generally reserved for the over 40 crowd in New England. The younger the people get, the less the accent seems to come out.
I think Clevelanders take things more personally then just about any populous of any city on Earth with the exception of maybe Kabul Afghanistan. The city has been the subject of plenty of abuse. Basically since the Cuyahoga River lit on fire like 300 years ago. Since, it has been a non-stop turn-style of media organizations badgering Cleveland for all they are worth.
But it’s not like Cleveland is the only city where bad/embarrassing things happen. They happen everywhere. Boston is the city where the 9/11 terrorists managed to board airplanes and where the “Big Dig” happened. New York is the city that nearly managed to collapse our entire financial system three years ago. Chicago and Detroit nearly burnt themselves down on multiple occasions. Los Angeles, has managed to become flat broke while being the residence of the richest populous in the country. Finding someone who knows how to read in Miami is like trying to find a Democratic Atheist in Texas. Texas gave us George Herbert Walker Bush. Philly fans booed Santa Claus. Cleveland is the city that accidently managed to light a river on fire like 70 years ago and that Lebron James embarrassed on ESPN. Oh, let’s all just kill ourselves now.
So what’s the difference? Cleveland vehemently, to the point of a fault, defends itself in the face of opposition. All that this accomplishes is more attention for a sore topic. Nobody is ever going to stop talking about “The Decision” as long every time they do, they receive 3 million hits to their news story or a record breaking television broadcast. While they might be assholes, media moguls are not stupid people. Controversy sells and they are in the business of making money. Whether you agree with, disagree with, are hurt or offended by something does not matter, it will still make them money. So if you have a large population center of overly defensive people who are more than willing to pay attention to negative press, of course people will take advantage of that. And they will keep doing so until the gravy train stops. There is no better, clearer cut example of this then Forbes magazine rating Cleveland America’s most miserable city in 2009. Obviously there is no such method of properly indexing misery of millions of people. Anyone who made it through the fourth grade realizes this. But they publish these sorts of “ratings” once a year, with the statistics purposely manipulated in order to best piss off the most sensitive crowds. And sorry Cleveland, you are by far the most sensitive crowd so it makes sense for the shitheads at Forbes to do these things.
In my opinion, other cities do a better job of owning their “issues”. If you tell a Clevelander that their town is full of corn fields, they will bark back at you about how “there are no farms in Greater Cleveland.” It will generally spur a heated retort from them. Meanwhile, if you call someone from Boston a “Chowder Head”, they will generally tell you something about the industry and what it has accomplished for the region and the rich history behind it. And how much money it is still making and how many people have jobs because of it. They own it. They realize that these are the things that made Boston, Boston and they aren’t anything to be ashamed about.
So what made Cleveland, Cleveland? It’s convenient location as a gateway between the Midwestern and Eastern population centers as well as the steel and the manufacturing industry all the while, producing the media and ideas behind this country’s Rock & Roll Industry. More recently, it has built itself into the leading city for Biomedical, Health and related research in the entire United States of America. Not far outside of the city lies the single greatest amusement park on Earth (and that is not just my opinion) that nobody has ever heard of in Cedar Point, which is surrounded by a chain of what seem like borderline tropical, party islands that are only a 30 minute ferry ride away in Put in Bay. And don’t even get me started on the dining and food industry downtown anchored by the absolute standard in farmers markets “The West Side Market”. But they don’t own it.
People outside of Cleveland wouldn’t ever know about things like the Cleveland Clinic managing to transplant faces of attack victims successfully or their finding proven methods of creating new spinal cords for paralyzed people using stem cells or any number of the royalty and celebrities that refuse treatment at any other hospital system outside of the Cleveland Clinic. No, if you ask anyone what they think is going on in Cleveland, they will tell you that it is the city that Lebron James left or a city that has lousy weather in the winter.
Just about everyone who I meet after I tell them that I grew up in the Cleveland area asks me “So did you grow up on a farm”. These aren’t dumb people. One of the guys who asked me this is one of the industry leaders in the sports medicine field along the Eastern Seaboard. They’re not trying to be rude, they just honestly don’t know so the natural inclination is to generalize.
However, if you ask someone from around here, what they think is going on in Chicago, they will say something like “Oh, I love Chicago, such a fun city; I would love to get back there.” So what’s the difference? Chicago has just as bad, if not worse weather in the winter, is smack dab in the middle of this countries grain belt with nearly three times as many farms in its home state of Illinois, but nobody identifies Chicago that way, why?
To me, the answer is branding. More people were murdered last year in “Chicago land” then any other region in this country but that story comes and goes and the positive aspects of Chicago again overshadow the negatives. Before you know it people are again talking about the airline industries resurgence and their merchandising prowess of Chicago and how proud everyone is of Obama. This is the way their town is branded. They realize their identity and they own it.
Imagine for a minute if Cleveland held that statistic: we would hear about Cleveland being the murder capital of America, every day of our lives for years to come. This is because, the local population enables the story to live on and on with their own stubbornness and protesting. They don’t let things die. Thanks to this reputation alone, every media company in the country would continuously pound home the point via the internet and television and late night talk show hosts all because they know they are going to get a major reaction out of the city. And that reaction draws attention, which boost ratings and in turn fills their pockets. Because Cleveland is a town who’s brand is in a constant state of flux based off of whatever the flavor of the week is. And that is often a lousy flavor. One year it will be Lebron leaving for Miami, the year before will be all the crime around town, the year before that will be how bad the Browns are, the year before that will be how the infrastructure is old and ugly and too expensive to fix. So the circle never completes. You never get back to the positive aspects when every time you open up a paper the first three pages are dedicated to everything bad around town. The image never revolves back to great healthcare, or how a Cleveland Ship Builder just won a multi-billion dollar deal to develop Naval Destroyer’s. By the amount of time it takes for one bad thing to finally die, something else will inevitably have gone wrong.
My advice, find your identity as a city, once and for all and to hell with what anyone else thinks about it. There is far too much that is great about the city that I grew up in and fell in love with to take such a half glass empty approach about.
And Boston, build some better friggin roads for the love of all that is holy.
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Nice
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