The Walls

When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, we used to drive about an hour south of my hometown, Jamestown. We were heading for the border. We were going to look at The Walls.

We use to heard about The Walls of South Dakota, but going to see them - well, that seemed to bring up some hidden trauma in my parents.

Inside The Walls were South Dakotans - not so different from us North Dakotans (albeit not as smart or attractive) - but they had some handicaps that we couldn't imagine in our worst nightmares.

For starters, many of their leading citizens had, to put it politely, departed controlled flight:

[T]here’s a small group of people — and you know, some of them don’t live in South Dakota, not everybody out there knows that. You know there’s a couple of yahoos in Minneapolis and there’s a guy out in Denver, there’s people from outside the walls of South Dakota who are perpetuating this hate campaign.

Every once in a while, someone would climb over The Walls, or occasionally the North Dakota Navy would find some piteous wretch who'd floated around The Walls and up the Missouri, and bring them in. They were a strange bunch, South Dakotans; many seemed to expect horrible things from the people outside The Walls, "yahoos" they'd been told were frothing with "hate" for them and their Dear Senator, Tom Daschle. Life for them was an endless, nasty, brutish thing - growing spring wheat, making corn mosaics, blasting rock into native American statues, and reading the Argus Leader. They honestly didn't know what to expect outside The Walls, because they'd never been told the truth about what lay outside South Dakota.

Thirty years later, The Walls still stand, and the insane leaders inside The Walls continue peddling their scurrilous propaganda to the huddled masses. And yet a spark still flickers in the South Dakotan heart, yearning to be free, yearning to take their place among the people outside The Walls.

Editor Randall Beck! If you want an end to the "hate", come to this blog! Editor Beck, if you want those yahoos to quit vexing you so, tear down The Walls!

Posted by Mitch at August 12, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBack