White Boy

What do regular Americans worry about in the first five minutes after they wake up in the morning? They worry about their kids. Their bills. How they’ll afford to pay the mortgage and fill the tank. They don’t worry about Iran or renovating the White House or any of the numerous other things Trump spent the last year rambling about. Republicans did not speak to the issues that directly and immediately impact regular Americans. They did not present a compelling plan to deal with those issues. That’s why they’re getting crushed. And they deserve it.

These Ring videos of certain demographics raiding candy bowls on Halloween bring me back to what I like to call the Farm Stand Theory and which I think has been coined elsewhere as the Farm Stand Test. Most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in have had a house with an unmanned farm stand. You take fresh produce or eggs and leave the money in a box. It runs entirely on the honor system. If you are moving and looking for a new community, find one that has a farm stand. The farm stand immediately tells you that the community is safe, neighborly, and high trust. The farm stand reveals more than any other single observable factor ever could. Even if you never use the farm stand, you can rest easy knowing it’s there. If your neighborhood not only doesn’t have a farm stand but *couldn’t* have one, even in theory, that means you live in a shit hole. It means you can’t even trust the people around you to be minimally civilized and decent. People who live in the city like to brag about the nice restaurants and stores nearby. But the vast majority of neighborhoods in the vast majority of cities couldn’t sustain a farm stand for even a day. It would be looted and wiped out within about 45 minutes. That makes them shit holes. I don’t care how expensive the houses are or how many restaurants you have nearby. You’re surrounded by dishonorable, deceitful thieves. You live in a dump, I’m sorry to tell you. But the uncomfortable (for some people, not me) fact about the farm stand is that it also tells you something else: if you have an unmanned farm stand, your community is probably overwhelmingly white. It could also have an Asian population and sustain a farm stand just fine. But that’s about the extent of the “diversity” you’re likely to find if you’re trying to live in a Farm Stand Eligible location, which you should be. A neighborhood could be wealthy or middle class or lower income and have a farm stand. The farm stand doesn’t tell you much about the average tax bracket of a community. It does tell you something about its demographics. Feel however you want about that fact. But it is a fact.