Rising Hegemon
Melissa Maeyer moved to North Dakota from the Washington, D.C.-area three years ago and quickly noticed one thing different about young adults around here: their relationship with booze.
She said young people in North Dakota consume much more liquor than their East Coast counterparts. And they seem to wear alcohol-related brushes with the law as badges of honor, she said.
"It's like a rite of passage," said Maeyer, 24, who works at two bars. "I have never heard so many people casually talking about how many drunken driving or minor consuming alcohol arrests they've had."
A recent study from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health seems to bear out her observation. It found more than 31 percent of North Dakotans age 12 and older said they had five or more drinks in one sitting during the month before the survey, done in 2002 and 2003. The national average for binge drinking was 23 percent.
We always see news articles about drug use in the slums of American Cities and the cause is almost always attributed socio-economic poverty and lack of self-worth. I've been to North Dakota. Though there is obviously less congestion than Harlem or Watts, the poverty and lack of self-worth are there.
And there is an all-encompassing BOREDOM!
There are always these paens to the rural life and small-town Norman Rockwell American. When you grow up in flyover country, in rural nowhere land you have this simple romanticism shoved down your throat.
But people in the Midwest are not unsophisticated. They harbor deep inside, to their marrow, that things are going on in the world, and that they are not happening where they live. There is a soul-sucking boredom on the plains of North Dakota that makes it the equivalent of mid-Siberia. It is freaking Siberia. At least during the Cold War the fact that there is pretty much a nuclear missile warhead for each North Dakota family gave them something. Now all they have is boredom.
And that is why they drink.
A whole bunch of meth-labs there too.
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