today’s bad take (paraphrased: “it makes total sense that someone living in this perfectly average rural midwestern home i photographed would want to kidnap the governor of michigan due to being poor”) is horrifying, but a natural extension of the way the midwest is often framed

every article abt the midwest for the last 8000 years: the sky was grey & sad. tired buildings sighed, ready to buckle under their cultural irrelevance; the citizens shuffled sadly through their empty lives, totally unlike the real people in the parts of this country that matter

the truth is that like everywhere in america, socioeconomics in the midwest are really complicated! the midwest, in general, is really complicated, and you can take that from this trans jewish man who’s lived his whole life in ohio lmao

if you’ve never lived somewhere where a fifteen minute drive deposits you in a different version of reality, you don’t understand the midwest. tbh if you’ve never lived in the midwest while making less than 50k/year you don’t understand the midwest!

newspapers out here are dying (shoutout to all the incredible plain dealer reporters turned out of their jobs earlier this year, just for example), and so there is less nuance in the way this part of the country is talked about with every passing day.

but people in the midwest are people, just like people anywhere else! some of them are awful and some of them are great, just like people anywhere else! class in the midwest is a complex and layered thing, just like class is anywhere else!

anyway the point of this is: i invite truly anyone who has ever written about the midwest from the perspective of an outsider to come live here for one (1) year. in fact, i dare you. do it! cost of living is generally low, and you will learn a lot.

otherwise: if you don’t know, you don’t know. folks in the midwest are not provincial relics of a time gone by, wasting away in the middle of nowhere; we’re complicated people living complicated lives in an incredibly complicated historical moment. stop pretending otherwise.