5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About the Midwest

Middle America is often associated with a nerve-soothing lack of criminal activity. If you've ever expressed an opinion like this to someone who's lived there, you were probably met with a defense along the lines of "Yeah, well what about Chicago?" That's a completely valid response. People haven't taken to calling it "Chiraq" for nothing.

There were more people killed by gun violence in Chicago than American soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012. Just a reminder, we were at war with Afghanistan for every single one of those years. In case you're wondering, the Windy City's total was around 5,000, while the war claimed closer to 2,000 lives during the same time.

So, the Midwest "has that going for it" when it comes to crime, so to speak. It's also worth adding to that argument that frequent "Murder Capital of the United States" contenders like St. Louis, Missouri; East St. Louis, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana are all located in the central time zone as well.

Joshua Lott/Getty Images News/Getty Images
People are lining up to buy ($1,000) homes in Detroit!

Well, Detroit isn't, but it's still in the Midwest, so shut the fuck up, comments section. Anyway, with almost no exception, the kind of crime that causes murder rates like the ones those cities frequently experience is also the kind of crime that's pretty easy to avoid. A lot of it is gang-related violence that's contained to particular sections of the city. Once you hit those sleepy, rural areas where buildings and people are few and far between, things get a lot less terrifying, right?

Wrong. In fact, depending on where you are, it could actually be far worse. Like so many of life's other major calamities, the problem is oil.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Watford City, North Dakota, is the new West Baltimore.

As it turns out, there's a ton of it in North Dakota. The Parshall Oil Field was discovered there in 2006 and immediately produced a glut of readily available, relatively high-paying jobs.

In a lot of ways, it's been a great thing. North Dakota currently boasts the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at a mind-blowing 2.6 percent, and its GDP is 29 percent higher than the national average. Fiscally speaking, things are good (to the tune of a $1 billion budget surplus), but in a lot of other ways, the state is falling apart.

See, a lot of those jobs that are available to almost anyone who wants them amount to not a lot more than extremely dangerous and therefore especially lucrative manual labor. For people with a lack of real-world work skills, like, say, hardened criminals, the opportunity is just too good to pass up.

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People are showing up for work faster than places of employment can be built!

So, while wealth and prosperity are on the rise, so are crime rates. We aren't talking small increases, either. In the tiny town of Watford City, whose slogan promises that it's a place where you can "live the good life" and boasts a population smaller than that of the high school I graduated from (1,700 as of the 2010 census), crime is up by motherfucking 565 percent.

It's also bleeding into neighboring states. Roosevelt County in Montana has seen an 855 percent increase in arrests since the oil boom started. It's not just bar fights and property crimes, either. The website city-data.com ranks crime rates by city on a scale of 0 to 1,000, with 1,000 being the most violent. They list the national average for violent crime in 2012 at 214.0. How does Watford City compare? A little less than 300 points higher, with a relatively insane 502.7.

city-data.com
"It was the kind of town where no one even bothered to lock their doors at night ..."

That number doesn't put Watford City in league with the Oaklands of the world or anything, but it does put it ahead of New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and plenty of other famous crime movie locations. In the name of saving the best statistic for last, have a look at how Watford City compared to the national average for violent crime just five short years ago:

city-data.com
Hooray, progress!

Also, meth. It's always been a problem in the Midwest, and it's really a problem now that everyone in North Dakota can afford to smoke it without going broke. The drug trade in North Dakota is such that actual Mexican drug cartels have set up shop in that area. If that sounds like the kind of ghost story that authorities like to spread around to scare people without providing any real proof, direct your attention to Project Safe Bakken, a joint effort between the FBI and police in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada that's aimed at curtailing the boom in drug activity in the region. "Bakken" refers to the below-ground rock formation where the Parshall Oil Field was discovered.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images News/Getty Images
But it looks so safe already!

This might still seem like a distant problem that only impacts a small area of the country, but the Parshall Oil Field was discovered using methods we haven't always had at our disposal, and it's being used to look for oil in all sorts of Midwest areas (and possibly causing earthquakes in the process). It will work again somewhere else, and probably lots of somewhere elses after that one. If you think oil destroyed the country when we went looking for it in the Middle East, North Dakota is just a preview of how bad things are likely to get now that we're looking for it here at home.

That said, it's also hot as shit for a good part of the year. Summers in the Midwest are just as brutal as the winters. Since I've moved to Los Angeles, I honestly don't recall a single day when the temperature outside reached 100 degrees or more. It happened all the time in South Dakota. To give you an idea of how common it was, have a gander at this list of the hottest cities in America, ranked by the number of 100-degree days they experience each year. See how San Antonio, Texas, averages eight triple-digit-temperature days each year? In 2012, there were nine 100-degree days in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and all of them happened between the months of June and August. That means temperatures hit triple digits an average of once every 10 days that summer. Fuck. That.

Goodshoot/Goodshoot/Getty Images
You could see Mount Rushmore in this picture before I cropped it.

Sure, 2012 was an especially hot year for everyone, but summers around those parts are generally terrible, even without record-setting temperatures, mostly because it's insanely humid. Have you ever been inside a sauna? It's like that, except you're wearing clothes.

Andrea Chu/Photodisc/Getty Images
So like this, if she was wearing a parka and a meth habit.

For further proof that weather in the Midwest isn't a nonstop parade of single-digit temperatures, check out this list of the average temperatures of 100 cities. Sioux Falls' 73-degree average in July is enough to put it ahead of seemingly warmer locales like Reno, Nevada (71.3). If you move down to areas like St. Louis, which is about as south as you can get without actually being in the South, the averages are closer to the 80s.

So, you're wrong. The weather doesn't suck in the Midwest during the winter; the weather sucks in the Midwest all year long.

Take Ohio, for example. That state doesn't decide so many presidential elections for nothing. A lot of people live there. I know, I don't understand it either, but it's true. In fact, if you remove their largest cities from the argument, you're liable to run into a lot more farmland in a state like New York than you would in Ohio. Check out this population comparison between the largest cities in Ohio and New York:

Wikipedia and Wikipedia
As if I need a caption for a picture as funny as this one.

As you can see, among each respective state's next four most-populated areas, Ohio wins every time. I mean, obviously, Columbus is no New York City, though. Columbus is way more dangerous, for one thing. Here's another comparison of NYC and Columbus from a website called neighborhoodscout.com:

neighborhoodscout.com
Again, the comedy writes itself here.

That "crime index" number in green works on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the safest a city can possibly be. You'll note that, despite having one-tenth of the population of New York, you're a lot more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Columbus, Ohio. How come John Mellencamp never sings about that kind of shit?

That's all beside the point, though, because we've already talked about crime. What really matters is this: Not everyone who lives in the state of New York can claim they reside in New York City, and once you're outside those boundaries, the rest of New York is a lot more Buffalo than Brooklyn.

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Reminder

Even that's probably a little too generous. I lived in upstate New York for about six months, and it was far and away the least "urban" environment I've ever called home. Nevertheless, I guarantee you approximately 99 percent of the people who live there not only assume 100 percent of the people in Ohio live on a farm, but that it's also somehow more of a farm than the one they live on.

According to this database of refugee arrivals into the United States for 2012, of the 4,915 people who fled Somalia and came to America that year, the state that took in the most was Minnesota. In fact, Minneapolis/St. Paul has the highest concentration of Somali residents in the U.S.

Wikipedia
Employment opportunities abound in the land of 10,000 lakes!

For the record, Columbus is number two on that list. Or how about Milwaukee, Wisconsin? Historically, racial diversity isn't the first thing that comes to mind when people think of the cheese state, but in that city, if you combine the black and Latino populations (as every racist does anyway), white people are the minority by a fairly wide margin. If that seems like a minor thing, keep in mind that we're talking about a state where people were still burning crosses on lawns as recently as 1992 less than 75 miles away in the town of Janesville.

Don't get me wrong -- you're still going to see a lot of white people on your average trip through the Midwest, but it's not quite like the Dakota state quarters made it out to be.

Yes, I realize Mondale took Washington, D.C., also. That's not a state.

Anyway, since I mentioned it earlier and it's everyone's favorite subject, let's talk about abortion. Remember when South Dakota "outlawed abortion" in 2006? That was actually a law pushed through the state Senate by lawmakers only. As soon as it passed, a petition was started to force the state to put the matter to a public vote. It received 38,000 signatures, well above the required 16,000. When the abortion ban made its way onto the ballot in the November elections that year, the people of South Dakota voted to repeal it by a margin of 56-44.

SiouxFallsBuzz.com
Be careless at the only strip club in town without fear of ramifications, Sioux Falls!

Also, quick, name the first state to legalize same-sex marriage! That's right, it was Massachusetts! Iowa was fourth, though, and that ain't too shabby either. Besides, they've actually stuck to it. Iowa voters have defeated every attempt to have the law that legalized same-sex marriage overturned, which is a lot more than can be said for California. They voted the controversial Proposition 8 into law in 2008, and same-sex marriage has been illegal in California ever since. The measure passed mostly thanks to religious and black voters, who supported Proposition 8 in numbers ranging anywhere from 50 to 70 percent.

David McNew/Getty Images News/Getty Images
It's not like there's anything else to worry about in California, though, I guess.

Hey, you know what else religious types and black people hate with just as much passion as gay marriage? Abortion! Get angry all you want at the thought of some Midwestern shithole being the first state to truly challenge Roe vs. Wade, but, like so many other things, don't be surprised if it actually happens in California first.

Adam hosts a podcast called Unpopular Opinion that you should listen to on SoundCloud and a live stand-up comedy show of the same name that you should come see sometime if you're in the Los Angeles area. You should also be his friend on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.