Define "nightlife." Is it getting blitzed as quickly as possible on cheap beer? Or is it having places to actually go dancing, cool lounges in which to converse over quality beverages and live jazz, galleries that stay open late, nice restaurants to which you can retreat after the clubs close? I've been in towns that have that.
La Crosse doesn't. Nightlife in La Crosse is defined as barhopping. There's no dancing, no real conversation, no culture. The guys buy all-you-can-drink wristbands and pour themselves into oblivion. The girls walk into bars, scope around for 10 or 15 minutes to find guys willing to buy them drinks (then laugh at them behind their back), and if no suckers are forthcoming, they leave for another place.
If that's what it's like in Green Bay, I agree there's no nightlife.
"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:
I like much of them small towns. I've lived in them most of my life.
But one thing they rarely do well is diversity.
And I don't mean diversity of the sort that the politically correct are ranting about. Frankly I think that's as antagonistic to true diversity as it gets.
I mean the real diversity. The diversity that recognizes that people are
individuals and have widely varying interests and needs. That people drink not for one or two reasons, but for dozens. That people who go to bars or coffee shops or truck stops or nightclubs do so not for one or two reasons, but for dozens. That people want to talk with other people not about one or two subjects, but about hundreds. That not everyone gives a flying fuck about high school football or what's the best shot or how moronic Obamacare is or any other of a couple hundred subjects.
Small towns often just don't have enough critical mass to satisfy that need for diversity. And, so not surprisingly, many living in them have found the internet a godsend.
Now, I consider neither Green Bay nor LaCrosse a small town. (If you think it's bad in one of those two places, try living in a town of 1200 or working in a town of 10,000.)
But they are still small enough that ensuring that kind of diversity is something that the community has to work at. In a bigger city, there's enough of a population that people lots of those hundreds of interests can naturally find each other via Brownian motion; but in a small city, it needs a bit of extra intentional openness toward those interested in others of the hundred interests.
Some small cities pull it off: Madison, perhaps. Austin, TX, perhaps. Richmond, VA, perhaps. Most, alas, don't.
Because most of them define themselves in ways that are threatened by individual diversity.
Here's two indicators to look for. First, how do they treat "characters"? How do they respond to the oddballs?
Do they try to ignore them or quiet them or encourage them to stay silent or on the margins? If you live in one of those small cities, how would it respond to someone who announces they are an anarchist or a Rastafarian or a cross-dresser or a historian of ancient Mesopotamia or a student of vampires or who swears in the library? Do they look at them with amusement? Call them crazies? Treat them like nutcases?
Because how a town or city treats its characters doesnt just affect how those characters view the town. It sends a message to all those others who see themselves as "different" from "most people in town." It tells them "this is a place of conformity" or it tells them "this is a place that will accept me as me".
And the second indicator is "How much do they talk about themselves as a 'small town'?" As someone who has lived in true small towns of less than 10 thousand a lot, I'm always a bit bemused when a place with ten times that still call themselves a "small town." Yet, that *is* how a lot of cities see themselves.
But if they do, its a pretty good bet they'll be limited in their openness to individual variation. They can't be, because part of the essence of small town life is homogeneity. It's being united in shared priorities (some combination of family, key employers or industries, schools, perhaps churches or local politics).
"Small town values" have a lot of things going for them. But they don't give attention to individual diversity. And cities that define themselves as small towns? They rarely do either.
I know little about LaCrosse, and less about Green Bay. Both have lots more going for them than where I live. But as one of those oddballs who has struggled to "fit" even in a relatively diverse small city (Iowa City) just as I have in true small towns, I do know that "more places to go" isn't necessarily an indicator of community receptiveness to difference. It can just mean "more places to hang out and do the same things everyone else does."
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)