On Friday night, I was privileged to be in attendance at the Stevie Awards for Women in Business on behalf of my company. Since I love to network (as in, I don’t shut up when I meet strangers), I found myself talking to people literally from around the world. I could talk favorably for a while about how cultural the whole experience was but that’s not what everyone here wants to read. Instead, I managed to find the same thing wrong with everyone I met. Every person I met had an opinion on ever place they had ever been, but voiced it in such a way that they were talking about another person. Today’s gripe: personifying places.
Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but the blue wedge on the original Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit was People and Places. The conjunction in this phrase is where I’m going to ground my argument, which should already tell you that my grievance is flimsy at best. Like our founding fathers, I believe in separation of church and state but I believe more firmly in the separation of people and place. This meaning that I don’t judge a person by the place they’re from. Unless its Jersey.
Regardless, one of the women at my table was talking about every place she’s been. Washington DC, aka my ‘hood’, was dismissed as a place full of cold, overly ambitious but non sympathetic people. As she explained, the people in DC were so focused on saving what they deemed to be important that their own agenda made no room for the remainder of humanity. I overheard a description of Chicago being ‘full of crooks with hearts colder than the wind chill factor’ but also heard that people there knew how to eat and weren’t snobby in the slightest. New York City generated the most buzz. Either ‘everyone here is a failure at trying to make it’ or ‘there are just so many minorities…in a good way I mean!’ Smooth recovery fellow nominee for best executive.
Either way, I was appalled at the over generalizations of geography. My tipping point was hearing New York City being called a ‘nice town’. Despite the obvious paradox in her sentence (correct me if I’m wrong again but city does not equal town), I arrive at the meat of my argument: People, more often than not visitors, thinking that they know a location better than the inhabitants. I’m theorteicaly allowed to say people in DC are overly ambitious because I’ve seen firsthand the amount of briefcases and Blackberries that take precedence over Metro seats than other humans. And still I don’t say that because I’m not from DC. I’ve been to New York probably over a hundred times but I would never belittle it to summarize it as a nice town. I find this offensive, to think that you are capable of understanding the complex workings of a centuries old city.
These places cannot be narrowed down into a few adjectives unless you’re talking about the weather for the area. I’m sure Seattle is rainy but that doesn’t mean it’s a depressing city. With what little eloquence I have, I’m beseeching you all to stop pretending you know what you’re talking about. Unless you’ve written a travel guide that interviewed every inhabitant of Chicago, kindly stop talking like an almanac. Your grand gestures of speech make you look foolish and downright ignorant. Stop exaggerating and get to know a place firsthand instead of spouting soundbites from tired Yelp.com reviews. You’re not best friends with New York City. Sorry.
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