Hindsight is 20/20

This excerpt from a recent Garrison Keillor post on Salon.com got me thinking about how life would've been different for us Norwegians if our ancestors had never emigrated here. Of course it doesn't make sense, because if that had happened I wouldn't exist. But it is interesting to contemplate how the place my ancestors left because life was hard has turned into a place I think I'd love, borderline socialist that I am. That's not to say I don't love America, because I do, but Keillor's points, tongue-in-cheek as they may be, are hard to dismiss.

"In Moorhead, Minn., you'll find a fine replica of an 11th century Norwegian stave church, which looks a little odd there with few trees and no mountains. And that's how the Norwegian emigrants felt who wound up on the prairie. The sky was too big and they had to learn to walk on level ground. But life was hard in Norway. The Black Plague had killed off half the country in the 14th century and made it defenseless, and so Norway fell under the woolen fist of Danish oppression until Denmark chose the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars and was forced by Britain to give Norway to Sweden, and between the Danes and the Swedes they managed to give Norway a national inferiority complex that lasted even beyond national independence in 1905. In these little villages along the fjords, people wearied of vertical agriculture and began emigrating to the Midwest back when it was a primitive frontier.

A Norwegian hates to admit a mistake, however, so the emigrants wrote glowing letters back to Norway, which lured even more Norwegians to the Midwest, so they missed out on the great Norwegian oil and gas bonanza of the past 50 years. Our oil profits go to robber barons who give it to their wastrel children to subsidize lives of insane narcissism, but Norwegian oil profits go mostly to the Norwegian people and subsidize the little villages and the roads and rails needed to connect them -- Norwegians are in favor of provincialism -- and also go to the largest pension fund in Europe, $300 billion, which is forecast to more than double in the next 10 years.

American Norwegians live in little prairie towns where health care is the main industry because everybody's old and their main asset is their home, which isn't worth what it was because the town is shrinking because old people have a tendency to die. Their ancestors took a wrong turn. They had no idea America would fall into the hands of a failed oilman who would waste the country's pension money on a war for oil while Norway, the world's most peaceful country, enjoys a very sensible prosperity. They've voted twice to stay out of the European Union. Why mess with success?"