During a lazy afternoon in a local tavern a while back we happened to engage in a conversation with a friendly young man who was happily anticipating an impending move to New York City. We were naturally curious to know why he was so eager to leave our humble prairie hometown and move to such a place, and with that starry-eyed look so often on found on youthful faces he told us that “In New York City you can do anything you want.”
His sentiment was certainly familiar. The notion of the Big City Back East as an Eden of unfettered freedom and a refuge from the blue-nosed bossiness and social repression of the heartland has been a staple of American fiction since at least the days of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson. A similar assumption has served as the plot basis of countless movies, rock ‘n’ roll music has perpetuated the idea well into our lifetimes, and this perception has permeated the entire popular culture to the point that it is now an unquestioned cliché.
Our young acquaintance had obviously not gotten around to questioning it, so we felt obliged to caution him that he would likely find it is no longer true. In New York City you can do anything you want, we warned, but just trying lighting up a smoke on even the most isolated bench in Central Park. Try putting some extra salt on your French fries, and you’ll notice that the city has taken away the salt shakers. Try to open a small burger stand of your own, and you’ll find that you have to jump through thousands of regulatory hoops and grease countless palms along the way, and if you are able to do so the city will tell you what kind of oil to use for your French fries. There are more rules and regulations per capita in New York City than the hayseed Republicans here in the hinterlands could ever dream up, we explained to the young man, and the unwritten rules of the social compact are even more plentiful and restrictive.
The conversation was brought to mind by reading about the state of New York’s new gun law, which Gov. Mario Cuomo has proudly described as “the toughest in the country.” Hastily passed and signed in order to prevent the state’s citizens from exercising the their soon-to-expire Second Amendment rights, the bill bans a variety of weapons and requires mental health professionals to report on any patient that might conceivably be a threat to others, among numerous other new rules. Every provision of the bill will be duly ignored by the state’s numerous criminals, of course, but at least New Yorkers can take comfort in knowing that there are plenty more laws for the law-breakers to break and that their law-abiding neighbors won’t have any “military-style features” on their guns. It’s the sort of busy-body nonsense that New Yorkers seem ever willing to put up with, and we’d like to point out to that young man in the tavern that it’s unlikely to happen in Kansas.
Say what you will about the rather rock-ribbed Republicanism that has lately reasserted itself here in the Sunflower State, but at least our lawmakers don’t concern themselves with what kind of gun a citizen uses to shoot the bastard that is trying to break into his house. They don’t seem to care how much salt you put on your French fries, either, and if you want to cook them up in trans-fat oil, they’re also cool with that. During one of our intermittent Democratic governorships they banned smoking in the honky-tonks, but through the nine months of warm weather we get around here the smokers can still sit outside behind the makeshift loophole fences and indulge their habit with beer firmly in hand.
There’s a politically significant religious right here, to an extent that annoys the local liberals and would appall a New Yorker, but by this point they seem to have given up the fight against drinking and gambling and the sex-crazed culture, and the only things they still want to keep anyone from doing are getting an abortion or marrying someone of the same sex. These is a relatively minor restrictions, given that neither prohibition would affect our daily lives, no one we know would be affected by both, and despite the best efforts of the religious right the state still has the most permissive abortion laws on the planet and all of our homosexual friends seem to be getting plenty of action.
Perhaps the most plausible explanation for this discrepancy in liberty is population density. The freedom to swing one’s arm ends at the other person’s nose, we are told, and there’s vastly more room to swing one’s arm around here on the plains. In New York City they have to stack the people on top of one another high into the sky, an arrangement requiring a certain degree of collectivism, but Kansas still affords a sufficient amount of space for the most rugged individualism. We’re nestled in a middle-class neighborhood in the state’s most populous metropolitan area, a big bad city by the region’s reckoning, and all the homes have back yards that will accommodate gardens and generators and chicken coops and almost anything else needed for off-the-grid self-sufficiency. A neighbor accidentally discharging a firearm, even one with a “military-style feature,” would be unlikely to harm anyone but himself.
Our theory would also explain the past several electoral maps, which have consistently shown vast swathes of Republican red flecked with tiny dots of Democratic blue. Unfortunately for the GOP, those tiny dots are jam-packed with people demanding ever more rules be imposed on the people upstairs, while those vast swathes are populated by a smaller number of people driving gas-guzzling SUVs and firing shotguns off into the otherwise empty spaces. Democracy being what it is, the people of the densely populated dots get to choose a president for the people of the sparsely populated expanses, but it would be best for the country if they didn’t impose all of their rules on the people living in distinctly different circumstances.
A happy hitch-hike across the surprisingly scenic state of New York many years ago taught us that there are a lot of down-home folks west of The City, including the amiable prison guard who proudly displayed his gun to us when providing a ride into the small town where the corrections industry is a mainstay of the local economy, and they all have our sympathy regarding the new law. That’s New York’s business, though, and so long as it stays there we don’t expect people outside the state to make any trouble about it. Should the federal government try the same thing here, though, it will likely be different.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 