. . .brought to you, I hope to God, by stereotypes about this place I live, rather than actual retail metrics. Check out the top ad:
Of course, it’s a companion piece to my photo from yesterday’s post:
I do have one question: if Idahoans are allegedly so hellbent on survival, why did I see EIGHT young children riding in the bed of a single pickup truck on the freeway?
Your acerbic observations of the wilder West always make me smile (and cringe). I miss that crazy part of the country terribly, yet I know I probably could never live there again for any great length of time. Sigh.
BTW, I don’t think the survivalism is always as sinister as you might suspect. True, there are an uncomfortably large number of people who either think the end of the world is coming soon or that the government is going to “take away our liberties” soon… or probably both at the same time. There are many more people–okay many more men–who feel they “need” these survival skills because, without them, they feel cut off from some kind of connection to the mythical frontier. The desire to feel that one could have been a badass (or at least survived) back in the day is a response to a changing world where everything is simultaneously more complicated to understand and packaged in a way that makes everything seem simple and easy. It’s the contemporary, right-leaning answer to the back-to-the-earth hippie movements of the 60s and 70s.
This post reminds me of something I saw when living in SW Ohio in the previous century. A pickup truck pulls out ahead of me with Indiana plates. The Mom-Grandma team is in the cab, with grandma holding a tiny infant in her arms, and a four year-old child stands in-between them using her arms against the dashboard as her child restraint device. The bumper sticker on the back? It read “ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART!”
I should add that this was in the FINAL years of the 20th century, not the middle! Hope you’re dealing with the smoke OK by now. It’s still super hazy over here on the Front Range.