In Defense of CT (Again) & Rejecting Traditional Geographic Measures of Success

by Joshua Michtom

The good folks at Gawker occasioned some consternation in my circles lately by inquiring, rhetorically one presumes, whether anything good had ever been produced by Connecticut. Predictably, both in Gawker’s comments section and in other outlets, Connecticut’s champions were ready to sing the modest praises of the Land of Steady Habits. My Facebook feed, well populated with people who live in Connecticut and like the place, erupted in curmudgeonly disdain for Gawker in particular and for New York City in general.

As a Brooklyn native and longtime resident of Connecticut, I am here to tell you that this provincial upset is stupid. Not because Connecticut is or isn’t worthwhile, but because, as grownups who must make our way in a world short on jobs and affordable housing, but rife with unachievable standards of success and happiness, it is fool’s errand to worry about how the place we live ranks in the estimation of people who live somewhere else.

I have sung the praises of small cities generally and my own small city in particular, but I was not always this way. In my Brooklyn youth, I wasn’t even aware enough of places outside my orbit to look down on them. They didn’t exist for me, which is maybe the highest form of disdain. I was at the limits of my understanding and imagination when I tried to imagine what people’s lives were like in the Bronx. Of course, as Brooklynites must, I actively heaped scorn on New Jersey and Staten Island, but without any actual knowledge of them, mostly as an expression of my own sense of self and place. If people from those places had ever heard me maligning them, they would have been right to dismiss my calumny as ignorance.

When I moved to Portland, Oregon, as a teenager, I hated it for the duration of my time there. I concluded that the fact that people seemed to enjoy living there, despite the well-publicized existence of New York, was proof that there was something wrong with those people: that they were weak, or unimaginative, or, well, deficient somehow. This made me insufferable, but it did not persuade anyone in Portland to stop living or enjoying life. They just kept on Portlanding, and now everyone wants to Portland with them, even though they are still unpardonably bad at crossing the street.

There are a lot of reasons why we find ourselves living in places. Often, it’s because we have a job or family obligations, or we just can’t afford to leave, or we don’t know where we’d go if we did leave. None of that means that the place we live is good or bad. It simply means we’re there, and for lack of other options, we have to keep living. It doesn’t matter if our place is the birthplace of the wiffle ball or Pez candy or anesthesia. All of those things come from Connecticut, and only one of them continues to have any potential to affect my sense of wellbeing.

I have no idea what is good about Wichita, other than having that terminal A that sounds like the terminal A in Ottawa, a sound I find pleasing and slightly unexpected at the end of words. But I suppose that the people in Wichita find something to keep them going.

So let us all stop worrying about measuring success based on our proximity to the world’s hot-burning stars of cultural relevance. Just as most of us will probably never be rich, and many of us will never be more than one serious medical emergency away from financial ruin, the vast majority of us can’t fit in New York City, even if we include Staten Island. We would do better to find pleasure in the things we can afford and the places that are nearby, and in this way wait comfortably for death’s sweet release.

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