There are times I'm embarassed to live in the Burgh...

..and today is definitely one of them.
15-year old girl, by all accounts, great kid, good church-goer, etc. shot in the face and killed this week.
Funeral is today.
One of the pallbearers?
3-piece suit and a Steelers baseball cap.
I bet even the Rooneys sometimes sit back and go "What a bunch of idiots".

 

Not sure I'm ready to blame the whole city for one person being a complete jackass, but if you would have told the story without saying which city and asked us to guess where it happened, Pittsburgh would have been one of my first choices.

 

Not a bad idea, maybe I should edit my post?

 

mark, if you'd like, I'll delete mine. I'm sure a lot of people already saw it, though.

 

True, I'll just leave it the way it is.
But, that was a really good idea by you.

 

Stuff like this ...
And the people tailgating when Big Ben was in the hospital ...
And the head-of-state-funeral coverage that took place when Big Ben was an idiot on his motorcycle ...

It makes the town look real Gomer Pyle-esque.

 

"Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

 

Without being insulting, this phenomenon isn't just a Pittsburgh-only thing. It's a societal issue. There are people who are just idiots.

 

Yes, in some ways. No, in the sense that there are an awful lot of rubes in Pittsburgh for a place that people claim is a "major" city.

A lot of it is that Pittsburgh is surrounded by rube nation. Drive an hour from Pittsburgh and you end up headed toward Erie; somewhere in West Virginia; Johnstown; Washington, Pa.; or Youngstown. Those aren't what I would call bastions of enlightenment.

 

I've been to Pittsburgh a few times, though I'm far from an expert. But I know many people take pride in the "blue-collar city," and with that comes a feeling of acceptability to stray from the norm, such as situations like wearing a hat to a funeral. Although, it's probably more accurate to judge people on an individual basis rather than castigate a city for one moron's actions.

That said, I've been around obsessed football fans from many areas of the country, and Pittsburgh fans are by far the most fanatical and classless and inconsiderate and annoying as a whole. There are some good seeds, but Steelers fans, to me, are like Dave Matthews Band fans -- the world could do without them.

 

I'm not a Pittsburgh expert myself, though I did live within earshot of KDKA for a few years at school and later in the real world.

Pittsburgh is a very underrated city. It never will be as highly ranked as Philly because it's too far from the I-95 corridor. And I think Pittsburghers enjoy it that way.

 

Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are in the same state, but in entirely different worlds...