NewsCut - A letter to the East Coast

NewsCut - A letter to the East Coast

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Bob Colins’ letter to East Coasters who try to move here, which was him 20 years ago. .

Dear East Coast,

So, you’re leaving, then. That’s it. You showed up with your “I’m from the East Coast and I’m made of tough,” and you couldn’t make it here. We’d like you to stay and let us give you another chance and I hope you’ll think about this before you go back to your comfort zone and talk about us. We know what you’ll say; we’ve heard it before. We’re willing to give you another shot, anyway. We don’t like people to miss out on a life-changing experience.

I was you, East Coast. I showed up here 20 years ago and before I unpacked I was already wondering where I went wrong. Minnesota? Who aspires to move to Minnesota? I was a little shot in New York once in a business which considers New York the capital and everything else flyover country. I get how easy it is to wonder whatever happened to your life, that the world was spinning somewhere else and you were missing out on the fun.

It wasn’t until I watched other East Coasters come here that I began to understand where people like you and I went wrong. We come here and we spend most of our early time looking for the East Coast — our comfort zone. We tell ourselves that the North Shore is like Martha’s Vineyard with different boats. We squint on Nicollet Mall and convince ourselves we’re in New York or Boston. We want to honk when a car goes by with an East Coast license plate and resist the urge to ask them to pull over to the side of the road so we can talk about the days when we could find decent pizza. I’d bring up the whole “merge on the highways” thing, but you probably take the bus.

It takes at least a year to even begin to work through those issues and understand the cultural riches here — not necessarily your kind of cultural, but cultural nonetheless. Like the arts, new experiences challenge what we think. Though uncomfortable, we grow to understand and appreciate the performance. We might even fall in love with it. That’s how we grow. Say, maybe that’s why they call it “culture.”

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