I'm a Rhode Islander, but I don't live in Providence. I live in one of the towns in the state, but I can drive to Providence in maybe 40 minutes, because you can drive from nearly anyplace in Rhode Island to any other place in Rhode Island in 40 minutes. This ain't Texas.

We're a cozy state, is what we are. We like the ocean, and Italian food, and the holy chowder of our ancestors, and coffee-flavored milk. We're small enough to avoid notice a lot of the time, and we like it that way. Rhode Island is like the little living room of your least successful uncle's house. You go over to his house for Christmas, and if six of you are sitting in the living room, everybody's knees are touching. You don't mind, though. Uncle Nick is a nice man, and his two sons turned out well, and you kinda like that cheap, thin fake-wood paneling in the living room. It's cozy.

So, we're a cozy people, content with our fogs and our fishes, and not many of us think about Brown University, the Ivy League temple 40 minutes away in Providence. Statistically, a Rhode Islander is more likely to have a guy who digs clams in his family than a Brown graduate.

To a lot of people, including some Rhode Islanders, Brown is where you go to learn how to be a transgender Communist, and you're required to take a course called "How To Hate America." In that theory, there's no mention of poetry, of the ringing words taught in the poetry classes, of the gentle girls in big glasses who drowse in books and sleep with Shakespeare.

And why should there be? A real American doesn't go to Brown. A real American goes to a trade school because no job is a "real job" unless you can say you get your hands dirty doing the job.

And someone, who hasn't been caught as of this writing, shot a buncha people at Brown, like a buncha people get shot in America all the time. "Buncha people," is the non-elitist, non-law enforcement phrase meaning "multiple victims" because "buncha people" doesn't sound elitist, and no one wants to sound elitist, or snobby, or smart, or educated.

Guys like Shakespeare have it easy because they write about love a lot of the time, and love changes like the weather. Guys like me who write the buncha people got shot column are stuck with bullets and blood, and it doesn't make any difference if the person doing the shooting yells, "Allahu Akbar," or "Jews will not replace us," or at least it doesn't make any difference to the girl with a hole as big as a softball in her belly.

In America, the national anthem is gunfire, screaming, and crying, and we're going to cut all the flagpoles in half, so we can be at half-staff every day.

About two weeks ago, I learned to use the espresso part of the fancy coffee maker my wife Deborah bought.

And on a cold day, with snow on the ground, I made an espresso, and drank it at our kitchen table. It was cozy, the way Rhode Island is supposed to be.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called, "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.

Photo credit: Nathan Dumlao at Unsplash