The Great American Rearing Lottery: From the Sun-Bleached Necropolis of New Mexico to the Smug Terrarium of Massachusetts


Another year, another set of arbitrary rankings designed to make the residents of one geographic rectangle feel marginally less suicidal than the residents of another. This time, the data-churning gentry have deigned to inform us where exactly we should be cultivating our future disappointments—I mean, children. According to the latest metrics of human misery, New Mexico has been crowned the absolute nadir of American child-rearing, while Massachusetts sits atop the heap like a smug gargoyle on a Harvard brownstone stoop. It is a fascinating study in the diverse, localized ways a civilization can fail its progeny, and as usual, everyone involved is missing the point.
Let us begin with New Mexico, the ‘Land of Enchantment,’ a slogan that must have been conceived as a cruel irony by a marketing executive on a heavy dose of peyote. To the statisticians, New Mexico is a disaster zone of low literacy, abysmal healthcare, and economic stagnation. To the rest of us, it is the sun-bleached necropolis where the American Dream went to die of dehydration and fentanyl exposure. The state consistently ranks at the bottom of every metric that involves the survival or intellectual advancement of a minor. The Right-wing pundits will inevitably point to this as the ultimate failure of ‘blue state’ governance, ignoring the fact that their own preferred ‘red’ utopias in the Deep South are usually just New Mexico with more humidity and fewer green chiles. The reality in the Southwest is not a partisan failure, but a total systemic surrender. It is a place where the concept of a ‘future’ is an abstract luxury, replaced by the immediate reality of a crumbling infrastructure and an education system that serves as little more than a holding pen for the next generation of the disillusioned. If you are raising a child in New Mexico, you aren't parenting; you are practicing for the post-apocalypse.
Then we have Massachusetts, the so-called ‘best’ state. Oh, the Commonwealth. The bastion of ‘doing things correctly.’ To the analysts, Massachusetts is a paradise of high test scores and low infant mortality. To anyone with a functioning soul, it is a high-pressure, meritocratic terrarium where toddlers are expected to master Mandarin and the cello before they have been successfully potty trained. The ‘best’ state to raise a child is apparently one where the cost of a starter home requires the literal sacrifice of a first-born and the social atmosphere is thick with the musk of Ivy League insecurity. The Left points to Massachusetts as proof that their ‘investments’ and regulations work, but they fail to mention that these investments have created an enclave of insufferable elites who view anyone without a master’s degree as a subspecies of primate. It is a state where children are not raised; they are curated. They are groomed to be future McKinsey consultants or tech-bro disruptors, their childhoods sacrificed at the altar of a LinkedIn profile that will eventually justify their parents’ staggering property taxes.
The metrics used in these studies—health, safety, and education—are hollow shells in a country that has fundamentally abandoned the human element. In New Mexico, safety is a literal concern of physical survival in a state that the federal government treats like a radioactive junk drawer. In Massachusetts, safety is a psychological straightjacket where ‘danger’ is defined as a gluten-enriched snack or a B-plus on a trigonometry exam. One state fails its children by neglect, the other by a suffocating, competitive narcissism. Whether your child is illiterate in Albuquerque or a high-functioning neurotic in Boston, the end result is the same: another soul tossed into the meat-grinder of a decaying empire.
The absurdity of these rankings lies in the delusion that there is a 'correct' place to perform the Sisyphean task of parenting in the twenty-first century. We are debating whether it is better for a child to be neglected by a bankrupt government or weaponized by a hyper-wealthy one. The Right screams about ‘choice’ while offering nothing but a choice of which ditch to die in; the Left screams about ‘equity’ while ensuring that only those with a six-figure income can afford to live in the districts where the schools actually have books. It is a beautiful, bipartisan symphony of failure.
Ultimately, New Mexico and Massachusetts are just two sides of the same counterfeit coin. One is the basement of the American experiment, damp and forgotten; the other is the attic, cramped and overstuffed with expensive junk that no one actually needs. Neither offers a genuine environment for a human being to flourish—only different varieties of survival. But please, continue reading these lists. It is much easier to move your family across a state line than it is to admit that the entire project is circling the drain.
This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Independent