To those of us who grew up during the Cold War, the division of political units into east and west seemed perfectly natural. We had the Eastern Bloc vs. the Free World, also known as the West.
There was Eastern Europe vs. Western Europe. West Berlin vs. East Berlin, with a big and scary wall dividing them.
This wasn’t quite as important as the Tigers vs. the Yankees, but almost. Schoolkids my age in Grand Rapids and Detroit periodically had air raid drills, in which we learned how to tuck our little bodies under our desks in preparation for the nuclear holocaust.
Even in Michigan, we grew up in a state divided by geography. The Upper Peninsula was a land apart for most of us. It had been raped by loggers and copper miners, and I grew up thinking the only inhabitants were Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe.
At least until Soapy Williams built the Mackinac Bridge.
Politically, the state was seriously divided as well. The lines weren’t exactly east vs. west, but a lot of the time in Lansing, it was the rest of the state versus Detroit. Sometimes the increasingly important Detroit suburbs sided with the city, sometimes against it.
Today, we are a state in economic trouble. We’ve been steadily losing political power relative to the rest of the nation. Michigan has four fewer congressmen than it did in 1980.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, that’s equivalent to losing the political clout of the entire state of Kansas.
What’s clear to me is that we who live here don’t have the luxury of squabbling with each other any more. When the Berlin Wall finally came down, some genius proclaimed: The Cold War is over -- and Japan won. Economically, he was largely right.
We should also know what will happen if Grand Rapids and Detroit continue to attempt to undercut each other. Ten years ago I would have said the winner of that fight would be . . . Indiana.
Now, thanks to high-speed Internet and fiber optic cable, I think it could just as well be . . . Mumbai.
Comments