Editing The Post-Apocalyptic Roadmap/Minnesota (section)

==Rochester==

Before the bombs hit, we were known for two things: the prestigious Mayo Clinic, which had many of the finest doctors in the country; and IBM headquarters. It made for a strange juxtaposition: a haven of medical science and technology in the midst of the reddest county in a blue state. If anything could stand as an example of the difference between Old Conservatism/Neo-Conservative thought, it was Rochester. 

Maybe it was for the best that by the time the nukes flew the Mayo Clinic was only the #3 medical facility in the United States. Who remembers a Bronze Medalist, let alone aims for them? IBM's decision to relocate production facilities to Mexico left Rochester in a precarious position: a one-company town with two companies worth of intelligentsia. The wi-fi hotspots became a haven for aging fatbeards trying to spin gold from straw, and the seeds of Rochester's undoing were sown in a myriad of local newspaper comment boards.

'Mother Mayo' must have seen the writing on the wall, since before the worst of things their Florida and Arizona facilities got fresh stocks of medical supplies. Not that it did them much good- no matter how many band-aids you put on a sucking chest wound, it's still going to kill you. 

Chicago was close enough for radiation to be a worrisome, but the real problem, at least as perceived by the Fox News crowd was the anti-intellectual rioting by all the Somalians that Lutheran Social Services had been flying in over the past years. White fright, class resentment, xenophobia.. In a river valley cut off by EMP, flooded by the sick and the dying, it was only too easy for a heavily-armed populace, unwilling to step up and volunteer, to declare race war. The first, and worst, were the truck bombs. The Al-Siddiq mosque, the Peace Plaza.. the four fanatics who managed to drive directly into the Mayo building before setting off their charges.. We'd made access to the Mayo Clinic the hallmark of our infrastructure, and that is what killed us. Watching the burning demise of the Gonda and Plummer buildings with the smoke rising from Saint Marys as a backdrop marked the end of Rochester. The fighting was brutal; it was then that we lost the few priceless electronics that had escaped the EMPs--and the people who were willing to work 'low-class jobs' to make more. It was almost surreal, watching the creators slaughtered at the hands of the designers and users. Somali, Hmong, Indian, Norwegian.. if you weren't WASP enough, you didn't dare go outside. They left the few surviving doctors alone, as long as they treated the rioters... What they did to the women still gives me nightmares. 

...Then the first militiamob came through. Packs of white supremacists from SE Minnesota, Stearns County and the Dakotas, their bloodlust unsated by the horrors committed in the Twin Cities and rez country, determined to unite the state as Cold Texas. The fatbeards and their allies met them with open arms, only to be shot at the hands of their 'white brothers'. The mobs forced the doctors into their gang, and blew away anyone who thought to suggest otherwise. Almost as an afterthought they blew up the water treatment plant and the power plant, leaving us the Waste-to-Energy facility as some sort of sick joke. I hear they didn't survive too long in Winona, but that may have just been a happy story to buy the teller some antibiotics. 

There's nothing left for us here. The water's tainted, the food supplies burned with the riots, and it's clear we've been written off by the United States. I have some relatives in the Dakotas, and I've got some gas left in the truck. Should make it a decent distance before I have to start on foot. Hope the coyotes out there haven't mutated. Wish me luck- I hear they've got cannibals operating out of the SPAM Museum in Austin.