Snarky Sunday: Bay State Nation

Oh, hey ‘Merica. Whatcha up to? Probably getting ready for the corn husk festival or some kind tractor/Winnebago drag race or whatever it is you folks do out past the Berkshires we honestly have no idea. But no matter what’s going down right at this very moment, be it getting the airboat prepped for some awesome gator huntin’ or trying to clean the buffalo poo off your elaborately decorated cowboy boots, you’re all Massholes now.

Yep, that’s right. Welcome aboard, fellow citizens of the Commonwealth. Just this week you finally have the rights and privileges we stuckup elitist Yankees with our stupid accents and our difficult-to-navigate rotaries have had since Creed was a thing: health care and gay marriage. Also we lowered the Confederate flag when it should have been: Following the Battle of Boykin’s Mill by the 54th Massachusetts Infantry in 1865. Who the fuck put it back up? Not us, that’s for sure.

So it’s good to see the rest of the country coming around. “Wicked good” to see actually, which is one of our comical sayings you will probably soon be uttering. We think you’ll enjoy being Bay Staters. We’re smart, we’re funny and we have high standards of living with a greatly reduced impact from the social problems plaguing much of the rest of the nation. Of course you’re going to have to give up big-ball bowling and calling subs “hoagies” or whatever lame term you use, but I think we can all agree you were on the wrong side of history with both of those anyway.

You know what? We can all save ourselves a lot of trouble and time going forward if you all just sort of skip being all backwards-ass about the obvious changes needing to be made in our nation and just go ahead and follow MA’s lead like you’re going to wind up doing anyway. Going forward, when you’ve got to figure out what to do about gun laws, educational attainment, environmental regulations and public services- here’s how this will work: A. Simply look at what we do and then B. copy us. Easy enough? Resisting is only going to make you look stupider when you’re forced to come around eventually after being repeatedly bitch-slapped by reality for an embarrassingly painful amount of time, which you will as history plainly shows. So save yourself the trouble.

For instance why not skip all the Ayn Rand bullshit and build yourself some light rail? Think of it this this way: yours won’t be a hundred years old so it will work far better than our system which shits the bed if it snows for more than ten minutes. Following that you can go ahead and get yourself some gun laws. I wager you may even enjoy planning an evening out without having to read the “biker gang shootout likelihood” rating on Yelp when selecting a restaurant. Then fix your schools. When people try and say education in the US is broken because American students lag behind Chad or some other dusty former colonial backwater they are talking about you, not us. Our kids score between Finland and Singapore globally. The rest of you guys…not so much.

This Chinese farmer used scrap parts to make his own working helicopter. Even their rednecks are better than ours.

Since it’s now MAUSA you’ve gotta catch up, so do like us and buy the textbooks that don’t have a talking snake as part of the biology curriculum. Spend the money on schools you were instead going to use to buy handjobs for some dangerous, pollutive industry that keeps sending its operations overseas. Spoiler: they will anyway. Trust us, you’ll find having a bunch of smart people around to be useful for all kinds of things! They solve problems, start innovative businesses, cure diseases and generally bring up standards all over the place. Sure they can be annoying at parties what with all the “knowing” of proven facts that that turn out to be the opposite of what your cousin said that one time. And they can be buzzkills when reminding you how drunkenly launching fireworks from your ass crack may produce adverse consequences, but it will be worth it in the end (see what we did there?).

#patriotism

And to any of my fellow residents of our fair state reading this: Now we’ve got to up our game as well. What separates us from them after last week? I mean, besides not having giant lagoons of pig feces in our neighborhoods or whatever. It’s on us to push out to the next ring of social progress in order to keep our leadership position. To this end we have to:

• fix our public transportation system (see above)
• go to single payer health care- yes, that is the only real long-term option
• stop being stupid about basing the funding of public schools on local property tax rates, it sets ups an inequitable system and you know it (I can use the word “inequitable” because you’re from here, btw)
• we have to really push on alternative energy and other environmental advances. Are you not ashamed to know California now has a better bottle bill than us?
• do something about our young people and their crushing student debt because they can’t actually live  here with it
• we have to continue to draw creative-class and STEM businesses, organizations and industries to our state. They want smart people, we got smart people but we got to make them want to stay here and our smart people have to be the bestest and smartestest of all because they ain’t comin’ for the weather, kiddos

Ok, that’s it. Oh, and everybody? Chowder is white. Stop it with that red shit. Just stop.