On my recent travels out of New York City, I experienced first-hand how friendly people are in ‘flyover’ country. I’ve spent most of my life on the east coast, and after being away from it for a while, I find myself desiring a community where fewer people live in constant fear.
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle, and other similar cities are full of people who seem broken. I’d almost feel sorry for them, but too many are in positions of power where their neuroses can affect millions of others who don’t share their incessant hypochondriasis.
What you see in the video below seems more like a clip from a documentary about California Covid Clingers than a satirical skit.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Twitter: @claytoncraddock
The best way to spot someone who's 'not from around here' is when you see them have a cautious or even hostile reaction to someone even more newly arrived than they are. Having been the New Guy for so much of my life in so many American locales, I've found that your true locals, whether north, south, east or west, coastal or flyover, are not much different than Kevin here in terms of being welcoming to all. It isn't a culture-war thing, it's just a territory thing. People who have been in a place most or all of their lives, regardless of their politics or the predominant local sentiments about politics, have little to lose by just being genuinely friendly. People who think they still need to solidify their transplant-local status by acting all local, mostly just have to outgrow that. It's rarely personal, and in my experience hardly ever has anything to do with factional alignments. Mr & Mrs Pronouns here come from a place where nobody has ever even met a real local, and so the entire concept leaves them in this state of cognitive dissonance, because the locals where they come from had their family farms paved over by suburbia generations ago, and had long since taken to the hills on their Harleys.