RYAN BAKKEN: Norwegians made Northwood not New Orleans
December 3, 2012 at 12:30 pm in Grand Forks Herald
Northwood, N.D., has the highest percentage of Norwegian American ancestry of any community in the United States. That high ratio of Norwegians explains the town’s rapid and complete recovery from its 2007 tornado. Continue Reading
I don’t it’s fair to compare a town of less than 1,000 people to a metropolitan area with a population over 1 million or even a city of 50,000-60,000 (Grand Forks). Without demeaning anyone in Northwood, I have lived in many different states and what I find is that people are hard working and independent everywhere. Most people around the world are the same: they’re trying to raise their children, hold down work, and survive the best they can with the resources and circumstances they’ve been handed. I dare anyone from ND to go to New Orleans, spend real time with the people in those neighborhoods, and I think people would find that if they grew up in those surroundings of mind numbing poverty, that they wouldn’t have turned out any better or different than most of the people in that city.
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while it is a stimulating and educational to experience diversity it is often not quite as much so living it. traveling will give you an enjoyable opportunity to observe it and even possibly to immerse yourself in it but the pleasantries of homogenous community are too often undersold while,might i say, the alternative tends to be oversold.
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I was born and raised in New Orleans. I left at 21 years of age and will never go back there to live. I also lived 35 years in North Dakota and went through the GF flood of 1997 and the 1972 flood in Rapid City, South Dakota. Despite the differences in size, New Orleans would have acted the same even it was the same size as Grand Forks. It has always had a ‘gubment will give it to me’ mentality and always had corrupt and poor leadership, especially in the Mayor’s office. In New Orleans you were either blood sucking off the tourists or selling dope (and that was all the way back to the 1940s). After Katrina (and to this day) the whole city population are basically wards of the government. In the case of Grand Forks and Rapid City – the people showed what they are made of – good hardy stock who never hesitated to help one another immediately in a time of crisis. After my New Orleans experiences (numerous hurricanes), I could not believe the rest of the country operated like it did during the floods in the Dakotas. Be proud of what you have up there and don’t let a bunch of left leaning liberals convince you that only the government can solve your problems.
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