The Mistake on the Lake?

All right, so this post would have been a lot more relevant last week, but I was very busy writing a sermon, which is somewhat more important than blog posts, since when you write a blog post that sucks, you don't have to stand in front of a bunch of people to read it.
OK, so King James has left the building. He was a complete dick for the way he did it, but I can't fault him for leaving... I abandoned Cleveland myself some years back. Plus I think the total number of hours I've spent watching the Cavs in my entire life comes to something less than one.
Some Facebook pundits say they can't blame him for leaving a city that sucks as much as Cleveland, some say that Cleveland has lost everything it had going for it. One of my Facebook friends, however, posted something like, "At least we still have the Cleveland Clinic."
And actually, that's nothing to sneeze at. The thing is that empirically speaking, Cleveland's a pretty friggin' awesome city.
Our hospitals rank among the best in the world. Foreign dignitaries and major celebrities alike brave the sleet and the stench of failed sports teams to receive care here. Dude, they performed a friggin' face transplant. A face. Transplant.  Some of the most important research in fields including depression, nephrology, and heart surgery have been made here. And Clevelanders have this place hanging out in our backyard.
The Cleveland Orchestra is world-class, and our art museum's fantastic for a city our size. Lucy, the world's most famous Australopithecus fossil, lives in our Natural History Museum, and folks from said museum have made bunches of other discoveries in collaboration with folks from other places. 
     On a wordish side-note, Australopithecus does not hail from Australia, as you might suspect. "Austro" means "south," and Australopithecus was found in Ethiopia, which is in southern Africa.
We've got the Rock Hall, amazing local theatre, and maybe I'm biased, but watching the sun melt into Lake Erie at the end of the day is as close as you'll come to seeing the face of God on earth.
You can buy a freaking cow's head at the West Side Market, eat corn that was growing on the stalk 12 hours ago, and eat at an Iron Chef's restaurant.
So what if our sports teams can't catch a break? We excel in ways that actually matter.
So why are Clevelanders so quick to bash their fair city? Well, lotsa reasons. Back in the day, Cleveland was like the smelly kid in your grade school class. Its river was on fire, its businesses were toppling, and the lake was a cesspool. So we mocked ourselves before others had the chance, like the class clown who gets by on self-deprecation. Plus, you know, it's freaking freezing and our sports teams suck.