Being a Minnesotan used to be a badge of honor. It probably still is to some degree up north. In the Twin Cities, it’s just an embarrassment.

We used to be salt-of-the-earth, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, pickled fish loving goobers in waist-high waders.

Now we’re the joke of the country thanks to the progressive left that have descended on this once beautiful state like locusts.

Being a Minnesotan used to mean working hard, protecting your family at all costs, and pot lucks with your neighbors.

I grew up in an affluent part of town filled with conservatives and progressives. The block where I grew up included large Catholic families and smaller Protestant families. There were two divorced moms on my block, and at the end of the street several gay men shared a beautiful victorian home. They opened their home every year to all the neighbors for our annual block party.

This was 1977.

Aside from having to get a Hep A vaccine due to some mishandling of some of the food at the annual pig roast, it was always a fun time at their shin digs.

We all got along. As Minnesotans we had been brought up to be polite. If invited to an event, we attended. We saved any snarky commentary for when we got home and we kept it private.

In the winters we really shined.

Snowstorms that routinely dumped a foot or two of snow in a short period of time were common – probably because we didn’t worry about global warming or climate change back then. We just understood what living in Minnesota meant and prepared accordingly.

That meant having a survival kit in the car which included blankets, maybe some nuts for snacking, a bottle of rum that the kids usually stole, and kitty litter. We always carried a scraper and jumper cables in case someone needed a jump.

Someone always needed a jump.

Cars were bigger back then, and heavier too. Most of us didn’t have all wheel drive or whatever it is that gets you out of a snowbank with the push of a button. We had other drivers to help us when we got stuck in the snow.

Which was frequent back then.

We gladly pulled our vehicles over to help Denny get his Impala out of the snow by rocking it until he was able to gun the engine and clear the drift that held him prisoner.

He’d tip his knitted cap with the pom-pom on top and the name of his grade school stitched across his forehead, give a slight nod and go on his way so as not to get stuck again. This is the only time we didn’t spend hours saying goodby to someone in Minnesota.

The rest of us returned to our vehicles knowing we’d done our good deed for the day – something we were programmed to do from birth by our parents, our teachers and our pastors/rabbi’s.

Nobody had to tell us to Be Kind, because we already were, to a fault.

It’s called Minnesota Nice. We’ll gladly give you the shirt off our backs. We’ll bitch about it to our spouse when we get home, but we could be counted on to do the right thing, even if we didn’t necessarily want to do it. We did it to avoid confrontation.

Confrontation was fine for those folks on the east or west coast, but in the heartland we knew God was watching, and if he wasn’t Ethel next door certainly was. She’d tell her bridge ladies when they came over on Tuesday, and they’d tell their doctor or the butcher down the street. No one needed that kind of cancelation.

I miss those days.

Now Minnesota is run by a bunch of carpet baggers who have no concept of what it means to be a Minnesotan.

People who thrive on confrontation have flocked here in the last several years while our salt-of-the-earth neighbors have packed up and moved to Wisconsin, Texas, or Florida.

Minnesota is in the news every day – and not just locally, but nationally – due to fraud, activism, riots, protests, and sadly death.

All things we as Minnesotans had avoided because we kept to ourselves. When we had free time after working a 60 hour work week we escaped to our cabins up north or in Wisconsin. We didn’t have time to protest whatever the latest trend in protesting was because we were too busy putting in the dock, taking out the dock, cutting the grass, and taking off the storm windows and replacing them with screens.

Modern conveniences like fiberglass double hung windows and anti lock breaks have given us too much time on our hands.

Hands we’ve decided to fill with dildos so we can wave them in the face of reporters when they try to report on the latest protest happening each weekend between the convenient hours of 4pm and 5pm.

Never in my whole life did I think I would type a sentence like the one above. I never thought being a Minnesotan would include waving a pink dildo out in the cold.

I don’t like this Minnesota. I want the old one back, I’d even take more global warming or acid rain, or whatever it was we had back then.

I want the Minnesota I grew up in where people were proud of their yards in the same way they were proud of their city. The cities were clean, graffiti was rare, and painted over swiftly. Panhandling wasn’t permitted or tolerated because it made the city look bad, and it was dangerous for anyone to be outside for a long period of time on a windy overpass in the winter.

Sure, we had some of the most generous welfare programs back then, as we do now, but the fraud was happening on a much smaller and personal scale. No one really cared if someone sold their food stamps for cash so they could be cigarettes, alcohol, or even a little weed.

We were a high trust society because we looked out for one another and minded our own business. We didn’t have to be told to be polite because we were.

We were the perfect state for the carpet baggers to come and exploit. We were sitting ducks.