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If you haven’t yet read BDN reporter Emily Burnham’s insightful story about Maine towns that have developed unpleasant reputations, you should. It’s brimming with thoughtful reflection and valuable perspective from folks around the state whose communities have been burdened with stigma over the years, along with unkind nicknames.
Burnham highlights the experiences of people in places like Lewiston, Augusta and Skowhegan — including the nicknames they’ve had repeated over and over like “Dirty Lew,” “Disgusta” and “SkowVegas.” As Burnham correctly notes, “Almost everybody does it, whether or not they want to admit it.”
We will admit it. Members of this board have all but certainly used each of those nicknames at some point (along with others for other towns) in an attempt at humor. But when you hear from folks on the other end of those comments, there’s nothing funny about the impact these nicknames or longtime community reputations can have on the people who live there.
Sanford, like several of the town’s mentioned in the story, experienced economic hardship after industrial mills scaled back or stopped operating entirely. As Burnham discussed, those challenges have also sometimes come with rhetorical jabs.
“It becomes this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy,” Ian Houseal, Sanford’s community development director, told Burnham. “If people say it enough, you start to believe it yourself, and it just builds on itself after that.”
When talking with Burnham, Aimee Thibodeau, the interim director of Bangor International Airport, almost couldn’t remember a time when people didn’t make fun of her hometown of Rumford and those who live there.
“Whenever our sports teams would beat another town that had more money, the other team would always say they only lost because our air was so dirty they couldn’t breathe,” Thibodeau said. “Things like that kind of get into your brain. They make you feel like you are less than.”
We should all take care to avoid making our fellow Mainers, in any community, feel this way.
Tony Luci certainly didn’t feel good when he saw that his town of Howland had been deemed Maine’s “ugliest” in an obscure online list of the supposedly ugliest city in each U.S. state.
“How can you say that so easily? I doubt the person who wrote it had ever even been to Howland,” Luci said. “I’ve been all over this country, and I chose to live here. How do you judge one town against the other?”
Here’s one possible explanation: Whether it’s a matter of location or race or class, people often put others down in an attempt to elevate themselves. These tendencies feed on a false sense that, for someone or some town to be good or nice, another needs to be bad or ugly. It is this type of thinking, not the people or the places being judged, that are ugly. This is true even when the ugliness is unintentional.
A kid from Kennebunkport might not realize that, with a joke about Biddeford, they have furthered a narrative with roots in anti-Franco American sentiments — a narrative that Maine mill towns and former mill towns in particular have been saddled with. But they have added to that unkind, defeating narrative nonetheless.
Burnham summed this up better than we could hope to.
“Even if people don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, the longer those beliefs are upheld, the stronger the sentiment gets, so much so that even some that live in those towns begin to believe in their own unworthiness,” she said. “What others say and how things look can affect how people feel about the place they live in.”
There is no one way for a Maine town to be pretty, or worthy of praise. There is beauty beyond the magazine covers and L.L. Bean ads. Howland isn’t ugly just because it doesn’t meet one person’s idea of what a place should be. Biddeford was a great place long before it started winning deserved recognition for its food scene.
Instead of joking about a place like Rumford (or anywhere else in Maine), take a walk down its main street. Talk to the people there. You might discover that there are no ugly cities or towns, just ugly critiques.
