To the Editor:
First of all, I understand that the article about the clichéd stereotypes of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts was supposed to be funny. I fully recognized the intention for humor. Few people I talked to found the article amusing though. Pretty much everyone felt that it did a disservice to their respective states, and I heard opinions of people from each state mentioned. But if other people were displeased with the article, they can write their own letters. Personally, I thought the jokes were tired, overused, painfully cliché, and not even that accurate.
The author insists upon calling his opinion in the article “unbiased.” Come on now, why even bother? This sort of article should not be predicated by some absurd claim of fairness to each state addressed; if it was unbiased there would be no humor because you couldn’t run the risk of offending anyone. As it were, there was no humor because the article just was not funny. Besides, the New Jersey section starts off with “Shaped like an armpit and complimented with that off-shore or oil refining emission smell, it’s hard not to know when you’ve entered New Jersey.” How much bias do you detect? How many stale, overused jokes do you count, because I count two already.
I could write an entire newspaper devoted to explaining why New Jersey is the most excellent state in the union, but the article to which I am responding talks about the people in each state, so I will try to present a more accurate picture of the typical college kid from Jersey. We hail from big cities that are as gritty and urban and tough as they get-Camden, Newark, Paterson and Jersey City, for instance; from rural towns with sprawling hills and lots of open space; from minutes outside Philly to minutes outside Manhattan; from the most stereotypical American suburbs on earth-white picket fences, tree-lined streets, and a Starbucks, from farmland; Pinelands; and the beach (not “the shore”, I live there, I know). Our best kept secret is pork roll, not Taylor Ham. We drive like we have a collective state death wish, and we can’t make a whole lot of left turns without making three right turns. Our state bird may very well be the middle finger, but we send it with love. We have dealt with Jersey jokes since forever, and they got old a long time ago. We talk fast and drive faster. We don’t live at highway exit signs, but if the rest of the world wants to think we do that’s fine just as long as they take the exit ramp going at least fifty.
If our state wasn’t so cool, we wouldn’t have so many people crammed in here, and millions of bennies wouldn’t invade our beaches every summer. So to hell with you haters, I hope the Jersey Devil gets you all. As for the rest of the states discussed in the article, I’ll leave their defense to their own residents. As you can imagine, sticking up for New Jersey is a full time job.
Sincerely,
Alexandra Deitz ’08
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