The difference between Ithaca and Rhode Island
In Ithaca, you will be made to care. In RI, no one cares if you don’t care.
As you may have noted from some of my recent posts, we recently bought a small waterfront house in my formerly-now-once-again home State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
For the past six weeks I’ve been back and forth several times, and expect to split the year between Ithaca and Rhode Island again like I did for five years prior to selling our prior RI home in June 2013.
During these breaks from Ithaca I’ve come to understand how living full time in Ithaca is a political pressure cooker.
In Ithaca, everything is political. You can’t escape it. You will not be left alone.
You will be made to care.
Even about your coffee, as I joked when we left RI for Ithaca full time:
Please excuse me while I go cry into my organic fair-trade soy latte served in a compostable eco-friendly sustainable cup, a portion of the proceeds of which will go to help indigenous mountain farmers in Central America.
There is no non-political life in Ithaca. It’s Obama’s America, compounded by geographical isolation and liberal homogeneity:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
The personal life is dead, history has killed it.
In Rhode Island, though a thoroughly Democratic state, people are not obsessed.
That’s because Rhode Island is a Democratic state but not a progressive state. No one cares if you don’t care.
It’s like, whatever. It’s refreshing.
[Featured Image by RI cartoonist Don Bousquot]
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Comments
It’s the fundamental difference between New England and the rest of America. As a friend once noted “being neighbors for 15 years is no reason to suddenly become chummy”
Now I can state Providentially, there really is an ocean of difference between RI and Ithaca!
So, Rhode Island vegans are NOT obnoxious?
I’d have to see that to believe it.
He probably MEANT to say “other than the vegans”. However maybe it is just assumed, after all why would they be different in RI than they are the rest of the country?
Welcome back, just in time for the last month of Del’s. FYI, you are required to pick up your coffee syrup though once you change back to a RI drivers license. And no the small plate numbers are still not available.
Professor, there are some things they are passionate about in RI: Eclipse or Autocrat (coffee syrup), Aunt Carrie’s or Georges, ‘Gansett or Scarborough or Sand Hill Cove or Misquamicut, … A great state with plenty of history and patriotism.
and corruption…
Indeed… When one political party has been dominate since the 1930’s corruption is a natural result. Only because of its relatively small size the corruption has never reached the level of of larger states such as Illinois, Nu Yawk, Joisey etc…
I thought I’d driven through RI once but I blinked and missed it.
Timothy Leary is like Goldwater to Progressives.
I’m still campaigning for a realignment to the Republic of Texas….
They don’t sell Texas maps up there or they do but have run out of them?
Rhode Island?
H.P. Lovecraft seemed to like it. Or, rather, be obsessed by it. With Lovecraft, probably the same thing.
Aside from that … ?
As a native Rhode Islander, I understand completely. A brilliant transplant from the NY/NJ area one said “…RI is not a state, it”some a state of mind…”
I’ll be making my sporadic “annual” pilgrimage for a couple of weeks in early September and by the end of that time will be more than ready to return to my adopted state of Texas! I left RI back in 1990 and never really looked back except for an occasional visit to refill on seafood, Italian fare etc.
I like being able to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights freely down here in Texas and it’s true that Texas is like a whole different country!
An early slogan for Rhode Island could have been “At least it is not Massachusetts”.
Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, walking to Rhode Island (so much for religious tolerance):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson
The monument to her departure is on land on Mount Wollaston she owned with her husband, around one-half mile northwest of the President John Adams Mansion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU12vJdqmWg
Beal Street is the eastern end of an Indian trail that became the path and road southwest from Boston Harbor to Providence, Rhode Island.