In Defense of New Jersey

Yeah I know. You’ve seen the state. You’ve looked the windows at Newark airport. You went to Ellis Island or Wildwood when you were six. You set foot in your Aunt Edna’s house in West Plainfield or your cousin Jeff’s house in Hackensack.

You’ve been to New Jersey.

Only you really haven’t.


The state isn’t a drive through Newark or a trip in front of a tollbooth. It isn’t the place you saw outside your windows on the way to somewhere else. It isn’t where Tony Soprano really lives or the smoke stacks off the turnpike.

What New Jersey is really is is the triumph of middle class liberalism. This is what a society would look like if run by those of us who voted for Bill Clinton a few times.

This society mostly works.

The schools mostly work. The interstates work. Even the economy works. Our industries are pharmaceuticals, education, health care professions and law and not the toxic waste plants you might think. We have the highest per capita income in the entire country. We have acres of public parks. We have clean beaches. We even have Cape May, a kaleidoscope collection of Victorian houses that may lay claim to being the prettiest town in America.

We’re mostly a collection of extremely pleasant middle class towns. Sometimes you’ll get places that evoke the East Village like downtown Montclair. Sometimes you’ll the sort of place where a future George W. Bush might grow up like Princeton or Chatham.

But mostly we’re just a series of nice smallish towns with decent places to eat and play surrounded by woods and then interstates. Maybe this isn’t your idea of heaven. Sometimes (especially when I’ve heard my neighbor’s leaf blower on a Sunday morning and imagined exactly where I’d like to put said leaf blower) it isn’t even mine.

More often I see the goldfinches in my backyard. I taste a fresh apple in an actual apple orchard about half an hour from my house. I get emails from daughter’s kindergarten class where there are sixteen kids in her class. I walk to the clean, neat library where the children’s librarian knows my daughter’s name and asks about her academic progress. On the way home I grab the perfect loaf of bread in our town’s local food store and then pop into the Italian place around the corner for fresh mozzarella and good tomato sauce.

Our car was broken into five times in three years when I lived in Brooklyn.

New Jersey is not perfect. I’ve read that my little corner of it is one of most segregated parts of the country. My property taxes alone would probably be most people’s idea of a mortgage although they’ve barely risen in seven years if you count statewide rebates. East Orange and Irvington are not a credit to any nation that aspires to be something other than say Zimbabwe.

In the last few years we’ve had the secretly gay governor who had to resign because he was blackmailed. The present governor was nearly turned into fifteen pieces primarily because he was speeding and not wearing his seatbelt. You start to think the New Jersey Governorship is the real world equivalent of Defense of Dark Arts Teacher position at Hogwarts.

But you know what? This is not the sort of the state where we say we’re grateful for Mississippi because otherwise we’d really be at the very, very bottom. We’re not even grateful for West Virginia. We’re grateful to be what we are and mostly grateful even to be where we are.

One of these days we’ll get it completely right and then you can come live here if you can afford it. Just don't tell the joke about the exit and we'll get alone just fine.