Americans often give unflattering descriptions of our country: We’re on the whole a bunch of rich, gun-owning, unilingual, sports-obsessed consumers living among single parents and criminals. The coasts are liberal, the heartland is conservative, we drive everywhere, our big cities are tourist traps, and most of us have never left North America.
We even do this regionally and municipally: Midwesterners are quick to volunteer how, with the exception of the lakes in Michigan and Minnesota, no part of the region is distinguishable from another. Every small town has a “historic downtown,” everyone says “ope” as an all-purpose interjection, and an hour-long drive is colloquially “up the road.” I often talk about how my home of Omaha is a large city that tore down every historic part of itself, won’t stop spreading west, and has no major university or professional sports team.
And yet, something happens when someone else says it. A righteous indignation swells up in my American heart when a Canadian (or, God forbid, a Frenchman) criticizes my country. Those may be rich, gun-owning, unilingual, sports-obsessed consumers, but they are my rich, gun-owning, unilingual, sports-obsessed consumers. We do drive everywhere, but only because that’s absolutely the best way. We don’t need to leave North America, because we’ve already got the states and our snowy and sandy neighbors whom we allow to live next to us.
The same is true regionally and municipally. That Midwestern downtown is historic: It’s looked the same ever since people were coming through on horses and oxen. Omaha — especially when a resident of its ugly stepsister, Lincoln, criticizes it — is the greatest city anybody’s ever seen. We welcome presidents, we make nationally acclaimed ice cream, we host hundreds of thousands of fans every June for the College World Series, and owing to our honest-to-goodness skyscraper, downtown Omaha is visible from 24 miles away. Take that, Lincolners.
That kind of fierce loyalty ought to be reflected at the state level as well. “Nebraska: the good life, home of Arbor Day,” is what every sign on an inbound road for my home reads. If you were to ask me about my home state, I’d tell you it’s a monotonous plain in the middle of the country with a large city in the far east, a college town 40 minutes west from there, and nothing except fossils and some sandhills for the rest of the state. It’s not much to look at from without or within.
But if you, non-Nebraskan, were to tell me that, you’d be wrong. Sure, we don’t have national parks, but we’ve got massive fossil deposits, excellent hunting, and even some impressive waterfalls on the Niobrara River. Our water is direct from the Ogallala Aquifer — and it tastes like water, not like Arkansas rocks or Oklahoma dirt or a Florida swamp. My water is, in fact, better than yours. Yes, the brilliant city of Omaha looks on a map like it’s trying to leave Nebraska, but that’s because it’s there to stop Iowa from moving further west.
State pride is an American imperative, because the states are the most American part of America. They pre-date the country itself, and they’re the whole reason it came to be. They gave us the idea of a federalist system and the Senate. They also gave us the Civil War. Yet we’ve long memorialized Confederates who fought out of love and loyalty for their homes, and that’s because everyone can recognize that state pride is a right and noble thing to have.
States often represent who we are far better than our regions and localities. I may be from the city, but my first job was on a farm, and my family consumes an entire Nebraskan beef cow every year. As a kid, I knew my senator. I still watch the University of Nebraska at Lincoln volleyball squad when they make the national championship every year. I’m immensely supportive of companies like Hudl and Nebraska Furniture Mart — and I will defend Runza from its uncultured despisers until death.
Our identities are rooted in our home states. It’s an American tradition, a piece of history that appropriately unites and divides us as Americans. Here at Hillsdale, we ought to embrace it just as we do the tradition which brought this nation into existence. State pride shouldn’t be unique to Texas. Your state and mine compose our regions and our nation. They’re our homes, and they deserve the very same pride and defense we give the rest of our homeland — all except Iowa.
Lewis Thune is a junior studying politics.
