Come Explore Minnesota
Feel the Spirit Shining Through
When I was in high school, our choir director, Mr. Hansen, entered us in a statewide competition to perform a new jingle for the Minnesota tourism bureau. I can still remember the chorus:
Come explore Minnesota! Feel the spirit shining through!
Come explore Minnesota! Take the feeling home with you!
Minnesota, come and see what a real good time can be.
Come explore Minnesota!
[Shouted:] Explore!
Ok, this was not the greatest song ever. But we sang our hearts out, and we won! We got free tickets to a Twins game—plus all the snacks we could eat—and the chance to sing the jingle for a cheering crowd of thousands.
Choral singing is a metaphor for what makes Minnesota great: We share our talents, work hard, and enjoy our success. Together, we create something more powerful and beautiful than any of us could accomplish alone.
Stronger Together
It is a Minnesotan belief, from Lutheran tradition, that everyone can sing—but also that nobody should dominate anybody else. It’s democratic. Choral singing requires us to listen to one another and to blend our unique voices with the group. We become better singers not by blasting as loudly as we can and drowning everyone else out, but by paying attention to and emulating our neighbors. It’s like playing tennis; you become a better singer by singing with better singers.
The most celebrated Minnesota choir (and rightly so) is St. Olaf’s. Below is a performance of “Beautiful Savior,” sung by the St. Olaf choir and 900 alumni. Notice the discipline in their quiet, unified tone at the beginning, and notice how those great big voices raise the roof at the end.
Diversity Is Our Strength—Really!
Minnesota has always been diverse. I can still picture the bashful but proud smile on a childhood friend’s face when she told me she was Cherokee. Another time our class was reading a history textbook, and suddenly a girl pointed to a photo of a Sioux chief and exclaimed, “That’s my grandpa!”
Minnesota has welcomed immigrants for its entire history. About century ago, my grandma started school a year early so that she could translate for her older sister, who spoke only Norwegian. Throughout my childhood, about a half-century ago, churches sponsored refugee families from Vietnam and helped them to integrate.
We all benefited from this cultural exchange. My mom used to teach English as a Second Language, and one year her student Xueyen invited us to celebrate the Vietnamese New Year with her family. Among the treats we sampled for the first time were spring rolls. From the first bite it was like the heavens had opened up and choirs of angels were singing. After dinner, all of the aunties—having noticed that my brother and I had devoured an inordinate number of spring rolls—dashed into the kitchen and fried up a few dozen more for us to take home. To this day those ladies are my role model for hospitality.
Minnesota is sweet corn straight from the farm in summer and wild rice soup in winter. It’s food you can share: hotdish, and bars, and thin-crust pizza cut into squares. It’s venison you shoot yourself and sunfish you catch yourself and veggies you grow yourself.
It’s lefse (Norwegian flatbread made from potato flour) and lutefisk (about which the less said the better)—but it’s also pho and khoom noj and all-you-can-eat Ethiopian feasts, not to mention the greatest Native American restaurant in the country.
Paradise Found
Right-wingers claim Minnesota is a crime-ridden hellscape. But don’t you believe them, not for a single minute. Come and see for yourself! Or at least familiarize yourself with the facts:
Minnesota ranks as the eighth safest state in the US.1
US News and World Report ranks Minnesota as the fourth-best state in overall quality of life.
Minnesota is a federal donor state. Minnesotans pay $44 billion more to the federal government than they receive in return. “That $44 billion difference between taxes and revenue equated to about $7,600 per Minnesotan. And among 19 donor states in 2023, Delaware was the only one where residents had a higher net cost than Minnesotans.”
Minnesota consistently ranks in the top ten healthiest states. Last year, Minnesota ranked sixth in the nation for healthy population and third in the nation for health care based on “indicators including cost, access, and health outcomes. This marks the third consecutive year Minnesota has ranked among the top three states.”
Minnesota is heaven for nature lovers. It’s the Land of 10,000 Lakes (there are actually 14,380 lakes, but that’s not as catchy). The state boasts some of the finest recreational areas in the country. For the past four out of five years, Minneapolis’s park system has been ranked number one in the nation—beating out even Washington DC—and St. Paul is at number three. A full 98 percent of Minneapolitans live within a ten-minute walk of a park. Suburban developments are required by law to set aside wetlands to protect the ecosystem and to provide access to nature.
And yet in spite of all that space for parks, Minneapolis is working on solving the affordable-housing crisis with its “blueprint for housing affordability.” As a result, “From 2017 to 2022, Minneapolis increased its housing stock by 12% while rents grew by just 1%.”
The Twin Cities metro area is a leader in the arts. As this article notes, “The U.S. Census Bureau puts the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro behind only the New York-Newark-Jersey City area in number of theater companies per capita.” And the metro area is famous for its vibrant music scene, for classical and popular music alike.
As for sports? Aye, there’s the rub. While the Twins won the World Series in 1987 and 1991, our beloved Vikings have never won the Super Bowl—and, worse, they hold the record for most Super Bowl losses without a win. This is so unjust! As Wikipedia informs us,
The Vikings have an all-time overall record of 537–438–11, the highest regular season and combined winning percentage among NFL franchises who have not won a Super Bowl, in addition the most playoff runs, division titles, and (tied with the Buffalo Bills) Super Bowl appearances. They also have the most conference championship appearances of non-winning Super Bowl teams.
Sigh. Maybe one day.
Finally, our wonderful Timberwolves may not have won an NBA title yet, but they are working on it; they have made the playoffs every year for the past four years. Slow and steady wins the race. Let other states celebrate their showboaters and trash-talkers. Minnesotans’ favorite player is Naz Reid, a hardworking, friendly team player who was the 2023–24 Sixth Man of the Year, and who is content with the role. He is so beloved that he has “even become the first tattoo for everyone from 18-year-olds kids to 82-year-old grandmothers.”
Heck, I kind of want a Naz Reid tattoo too.
The Limits of Minnesota Nice
Minnesotans are famously open-minded and open-hearted. We’re nice. But agreeable, peaceable people can be pushed too far, and then we say, No more! After Minnesotans extended a generous helping hand to refugees from Somalia, some of them repaid this kindness with shocking, egregious fraud. Authorities in Minnesota began investigating the fraud in 2019, and prosecutions are ongoing. I hope that some of the stolen money can be clawed back and returned to taxpayers, but the damage the fraud has done to hungry children and needy families, to say nothing of Minnesotans’ trust in one another, is outrageous and infuriating. And yet Minnesotans have risen above their righteous anger and have refused to lump every Somali immigrant in with the fraudsters.
And now masked, armed thugs are brutalizing and murdering Minnesota citizens. Minnesota is a happy, healthy, prosperous blue state; it is a refutation of the zero-sum, might-makes-right ethos of the Trump administration. Minnesotans have chosen to fund a robust social-safety net and yet Minnesota ranks thirteenth in the nation in median household income. Their success is a rebuke to trickle-down economics. In fact Minnesota is so successful that its tax dollars subsidize less-successful red states. That must rankle. I think this is one reason Trump unleashed ICE on Minnesota, instead of on red states like Texas or Florida, where there are an order of magnitude more unauthorized immigrants than there are in Minnesota.2
When people treat us with generosity, we could respond by betraying them, like the Somali fraudsters. Or we can be generous in return, like Xueyen’s aunties with their delicious spring rolls. When we feel envious of others’ happiness and success, we could tear them down and destroy them, like ICE is attempting in Minnesota. Or we can be like choral singers and listen to and learn from our compatriots. Together we can make beautiful music.
What kind of future do we want for our country? The future George Orwell described in 1984, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever”?
Or do we prefer a future where we stand on our own two feet, stand together, and stand up for what is right?
How about you, readers? Are you a Minnesotan, or have you ever visited? Isn’t it a wonderful place? What will you do to help bring about a Minnesotan, not an Orwellian, future for our country? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Minnesota has produced one of the greatest musical geniuses ever to walk the earth. True, Prince was naturally gifted with headspinning talent. Long before he became famous, there were rumors among Minnesota music teachers about a short, weird kid who could play every musical instrument. But that talent was nurtured in Minnesota’s excellent public schools.
Prince may not have looked like the stereotypical blonde, blue-eyed Minnesotan, but his approach to music shows he was one of us. Throughout his career he supported other musicians and was particularly generous to women. And at his concerts, he always got the crowd to sing together.
So let’s sing along!
It is true that the crime rate in Minneapolis is high. However, this is an artifact of how the city’s boundaries are drawn. This commenter explains that
Minneapolis, as a city, is relatively small compared to the metro area that surrounds it. Minneapolis has a population of ~400k in a metro area of 3.7 million people. So Minneapolis itself has a more urban concentration overall. The suburbs are their own separate cities rather than neighborhoods of Minneapolis. This is different from how many metro areas are allocated population wise around their “core” city. Crime in Minneapolis is mostly concentrated in only a few small areas, but there is less population to “dilute” the per capita statistics—resulting in numbers that might look worse than the reality on the ground.
When you do an apples-to-apples comparison of entire metropolitan areas, the Twin Cities’ crime rate is actually quite low. Statista has ranked the fifty US metropolitan areas with the highest per capita violent crime rate, and the Twin Cites metro area doesn’t make the list, not even in 2020.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are 100,000 unauthorized immigrants in Minnesota, almost 1.2 million in Texas, and more than 1.2 million in Florida.
I am so sorry that your home
state is suffering with this violence now. NJ stands with you!
Thank you for this piece, Mari. I like the picture you painted of Minnesota and will attest to the fact that Minnesotans are really nice! I didn’t realize that your home state was so highly ranked in all those categories.
PS I feel compelled to remind you that you forgot to mention the greatest songwriter of all time from Hibbing, Bob Dylan.