(no subject)

[mangosteen]

So the amount of vitriol that has been spewed in this thread is quite remarkable. Since I really don't feel like throwing more wood on the fire over there, I'm just going to speak my piece over here, and I can get flamed on my own merits.

Observation: New England standoffishness is a survival trait.

It's not rudeness, though it may be viewed as such. It's not paranoia, although that's a likely explanation to someone who doesn't know better. And ferchrissakes, it's not racism. It's just a completely different alignment of social priorities than what you see outside of the northern states, and New England in particular.

Why? Simple.

Observation: It gets cold in New England during the winter (and spring, and late fall.)

...which of course leads to the following.

Realization: If myself or others don't take care of me, it's going to get cold, and I'm going to die.

This, among many other things, tends to make you divide up the world into two groups:
1. People that will help me when the winter comes.
2. People that won't.
This makes New Englanders have pretty stringent criteria for friend-building, as well as the perception of familiarity. To wit: "Don't be my friend if you're not going to be my friend."

Example: A more down-to-earth example is the following. A friend's car breaks down at 3am on a major highway about 25 miles from where you live. They call AAA. AAA says that they'll take about 3 hours to get there (New England AAA sucks, but we knew that). Your friend then calls you, and asks if you can wait with them, or at least get them to someplace warm, while they wait for AAA to get there.

Let's say it's 8 degrees Farenheit outside. What do you do?
How about 72 degrees? What do you do then?
What if the region of the country you live in has the potential to go below freezing for 6 months out of the year? How will this carry over in what you would do (and who you would do it for) during the rest of the year?

This is not to say that "all friendships in other parts of the country are superficial". That's ridiculous. Rather, the bar is higher for the point at which someone in New England will call someone a friend, relative to the rest of the US, because of all the little things being a friend entails.

There's a lot more, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Comments

Boston vs. NYC

[frotz.livejournal.com]

How odd; I never would have put Boston and New York City into the same behavioral pigeonhole. I found people in the neighborhoods I lived in in New York City to be, if brusque, also unassuming and willing to take you as you were. The vibe I've always gotten in Boston is not rude so much as grumpy and unhappy, and very class- and skin-color-conscious, with a lot more intolerance for anything different, and with commensurate segregation and social boundaries. (I like visiting NYC because it feels more than anything like a city where eight million people have learned to get along with each other.) In neither place do I see a lot of people who are intentionally trying to be offensive, which is what I think of as "rudeness". (Granted, a lot of people seem to be working on different definitions; if "people don't act like I think they should" is one's definition of "rude", then the best advice I can think of for 'em is "don't leave home".)

Of course, there are assholes everywhere.