A Petition to Combine These States and Give Them to Canada for Free
Disclaimer: If you don’t care about the most meaningless places in America, which you shouldn’t, then this probably isn’t for you.
Yesterday, many internet users were reminded or informed that North and South Dakota are separate locations on a U.S. map, thanks to a viral* change.org petition to merge the two states into “MegaKota.” While the majority of people lightheartedly supported the joke campaign, I, unsurprisingly, had sincere, disdainful opinions about it.
*Viral when converted to North Dakota numbers
Lost in all the huckabaloo about “MegaKota” is the fact that both states are desolate expanses of fucking nothing. The sum of zero and zero is still zero. West Virginia, which is the fastest shrinking state in America on top of never having any real cities to begin with, still has over 200K more people than the combined population of the Dakotas. If you merged North and South Dakota into one county instead of a state, it still wouldn’t fall in the top 20 most populous counties in America. I’m not necessarily hating on the petition to consolidate the two barren wastelands, but I’m saying that more needs to be done. We can start by doing this:
Combine North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming (pending its existence), Idaho, and Montana into one mega-empty state. Then sell it to Canada for $0.00.
And if that fails, I guess we could work out a deal with Greenland or someth-
NOTHING, and I can’t emphasize the word nothing enough, is going on in any of these states. Look at the amount of space they take up though. It’s fucking embarrassing. That entire region in green has fewer people than the following things:
Massachusetts
Wisconsin
1/2 of Long Island
Cook County, Illinois
Greater Philadelphia
1/3 of Ohio
I wanted to make that section a joke with hyperbolic answers like “Greater Philadelphia” and “1/3 of Ohio,” but it turns out that both of those things are factually larger in population than the entire region in green. Not only do those five states lack people, but they lack places and things. They’re completely nounless entities. A quintet of question marks. There are no major sports teams or universities in any of them. No malls or parking garages. No downtowns or uptowns. No state playoffs, because there aren’t enough schools to form a bracket.
The biggest and most bustling city in the hypothetical state of MegaVoid would be Boise, Idaho.
Doesn’t look like much, right? Well that’s because those are just pictures of a random shit hole town in the middle of the Allegheny Mountains (Johnstown, PA). Boise, on the other hand, actually looks even more boring:
Boise looks like a young child played 5 minutes of SimCity on their parents’ Dell and then the screen froze so they gave up and ejected the disc to play Rollercoaster Tycoon instead.
When the five hottest girls in Idaho are all at the only nightclub in town, but…I don’t know—something about a spud competition on TV maybe—I have no energy to even think of a decent punchline.
The most viral tweet in Idaho history was someone sincerely wondering if a Native American, who’s been dead for centuries, was the most popular celebrity from Idaho in 2018.
The dating pool in Idaho is a Dixie cup.
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The second biggest city in MegaVoid would be Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which looks like this:
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Imagine pregaming on a Saturday night and getting the perfect level of drunk, only to be forced to take an Uber neighbor’s dirt bike to a run-down saloon for Plain Wing Night.
And the third biggest city in MegaVoid would be Coonskin Falls, Montana, which is actually considered a “Census-designated place,” because it doesn’t have enough people to qualify as a city.
The biggest college in MegaVoid would be Boise State and the second biggest college would be BYU-Idaho, which is apparently real.
BYU-Idaho is like if you took the lamest college in the world (BYU), moved it to one of the only places in America that’s more boring than Utah, got rid of the only thing that makes it semi-exciting (occasionally mediocre D1 athletic teams), and “cleaned up” its already-nonexistent party scene.
“A group of BYU-I freshmen were disciplined late Saturday night at 8:45 p.m. after being caught with flasks containing Dr. Pepper at a campus social. According to Peterson, the rebellious students were visibly buzzed on caffeine and making skin-on-skin contact with each other that violated school code.”
This would (obviously) be the more ideal proposal, but places like Omaha would’ve fucked up some of the statistics I used above.
I would’ve included Iowa and Arkansas, but then the map would be an aesthetic nightmare.
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And the most ideal scenario of them all:
Checking in on Kansas…
Also, I realize that places like Yellowstone National Park are cool, so I’d propose that we keep those. Or not. I think it has a supervolcano that’s supposed to decimate the country.