The bridge is very much about what America aspires to be: open, welcoming, engaging. Developing commerce, building relationships, free trade. Whereas the various walls and obstacles on our southern border reveal our darker inclinations: closed, hostile, dismissive. Limiting commerce, straining relationships, taxing trade.
Realistically, we want to land somewhere in the middle, much like that last piece of decking. We should be as open as possible to growth while being mindful that the rest of the world does not necessarily play by the same rules.
We should also factor in the costs. For instance, Canada is paying the entire bill for the construction of the Gordie Howe Bridge — Mexico never has and never will pay for walls (despite what certain people say).
Don’t get me wrong — I have no intentions of missing out on any of the Michigan summer. (Well, other than maybe a quick jaunt to Chicago or an unplanned business trip.) As we stand at summer’s doorstep, I am filled with joy at the prospect and ready to walk right in.
But also, I am a bit salty, having just paid our auto insurance bill. Our rates got jacked … again! (Yes, we have done price comparisons — please don’t provide my name to a friendly agent!) It’s not our lack of due diligence, it’s not our insurance company, it’s Michigan!
Michigan consistently has one of the highest, if not the highest, auto insurance rates in the United States. Turns out, verifying this is an adventure in click-bait, so I have a moral obligation not to provide a link. But I believe most Michiganders already have firsthand evidence.
Most of Michigan’s population is in the lower half of the Lower Peninsula. So recently when the northern lights paid a rare visit, it was understandable that the bulk of the people in our state were so delighted. But it had to be a bit of an eye-rolling experience for Yoopers.
I’m no Yooper (resident of the Upper Peninsula), but I did go to college there (go you Tech Huskies, eh?!). And among the things I learned was that with being way the heck up north and almost non-existent light pollution, it is not uncommon to experience the aurora borealis.
However, because the Upper Peninsula contains 29% of the land area of Michigan but only 3% of its total population, Trolls (residents of the Lower Peninsula) tend to forget that the UP exists. For the most part, this does not seem to bother Yoopers. But if you really want to experience the northern lights in Michigan, come to the UP in the winter and bring your tourist dollars.
In truth, I don’t believe that Michigan journalists are conspiring to keep Michigan a swing state. Like all folks in media these days, simply trying to survive is more than a full-time job. So I’m sure they appreciate presidential candidates coming to our state to share their visions (or their bile) — it makes for news that directly pertains to their readers/viewers. But the Michigan media certainly doesn’t have the capacity to orchestrate it.
No, we can thank the Electoral College for all this. Our Founding Fathers may have had the best of intentions, but there was so much that they couldn’t have anticipated, especially the two-party system. That part wasn’t at all by design but has become the de facto standard for most of our history. As a consequence, if one party dominates state politics, all the votes for that state predictably go to the candidate of that party.
But however you feel about the Electoral College, I think we all can agree that it makes certain states — so-called swing states or battleground states — more relevant than others. Michigan is one of them, and, on the whole, that’s at least better than not being relevant. Or to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “There is only one thing in politics worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
When I was in college, in the days before Internet, there was a closed-circuit system to deliver news and announcements — TVs (large cathode-ray tube TVs the weight of a Volkswagen) suspended precariously from walls and ceilings in various public areas around campus.
The system only showed still screens, but it could play video with audio. So the professor of the video editing class got some of her students together and pitched the idea of us creating content. The folks in charge were a little dubious, but the initial pieces were some nice stories about sports and college history, so they gave it a green light.
Then I got involved and started to create (at least in my mind) comedy pieces. My instructor and fellow students were fully onboard. But the admin in charge of loading the content into the system, not so much. My bits proved to be popular with the audience but made her worry about her job.
Eventually I produced a new piece about the notoriously limited dorm space at that time at Michigan Tech. It was not unusual for three students to be assigned to a single room at the start of the school year. I pretended to be an investigative reporter who had discovered evidence in the form of a secret memo revealing that the Michigan Tech housing department purposely assigned 43 kids to a single dorm room and pocketed the money. Then I got a bunch of friends to jam into a room and I “interviewed” them. I also got the actual director of housing to be part of a scene where I go to his house for answers and he slams the front door in my face. (He thought it was funny.)
The admin, however, freaked. I don’t know whether she thought it was real or that we had simply gone too far. But she declared that she was going to shut the whole thing down. My fellow students and I were indignant. Censorship! Tyranny! We schemed all sorts of ways to fight the power. But in the end, cooler heads prevailed. Our instructor carefully explained to us what was and what was not actual censorship, and she worked out a deal with the admin (the main selling feature: the fact that I was weeks away from graduation and would soon be gone).
The moral of the story? Well, there really isn’t one. It’s more of a gentle reminder that college students are supposed to be excitable and passionate and sometimes do things they, intentionally or unintentionally, are not supposed to do. Typically, the stakes and consequences are very low. But even when they are high like in these current protests, it’s good to remember that the vast majority of those involved are, in fact, college students.
Auchtoon!
