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Have you ever stood in the main drag of a tiny and quiet little village and declared, “You know, what this place needs is more homeless and burglaries!”
Apparently, for bourgeois white Millennials, that’s exactly what they want.
When I first had kids a decade ago, I was living in a Boston suburb, the type of place where you could probably find a gymnastics studio within biking distance of home. But before my second was born, my family moved to rural New Hampshire for my husband's job. We landed in a city of about 60,000 people, and a few years later we went more remote, landing in our town of 1,500.
Ugh! It’s so… white. Well, sweetie, I have news for you – so are you. Of the worst kind: an utterly, utterly bourgie and spoiled white Millennial.
The type of person, in other words, rural folk detest.
I grew up on the fringes of a moderate-sized rural city. Our immediate neighbourhood was suburban, but we only had to ride our bikes a few blocks to play in sheep paddocks, fish from a decrepit pier or muck about in wetlands. As an adult, I lived for a while in the inner big city and hated it. For the last three decades, I’ve lived in two country towns. The first was long overrun with Seachangers; the current one is being slowly encroached by Treechangers.
Call us country folk conservative if you want… because we are. We’re not too keen on change. Especially not the sort of change city-bred Millennials are so ga-ga for.
There are lots of little downsides to where we live: the long drives, bears in the dumpster, learning to live with well water and a septic system, and the fact that my kids have no neighborhood to ride their bikes around.
No: they have fields. Woods. Rivers. Boo hoo, there’s no asphalt and concrete.
But the biggest concern by far is the lack of diversity. My town is about 86% white (which includes my family). We’re lucky to have family and friends who have different racial and cultural backgrounds. Still, I know that’s not the same as having the girls immersed daily in a multicultural environment.
Could she be any more condescending? Her little assembly of “different racial and cultural backgrounds” sound like they’ve been as carefully curated as her collection of dinky vintage items. She talks of driving her kids on field trips back to the “diversity” as if they were going on trips to the zoo.
Which, maybe, they are.
Because we all know what ‘diversity’ really means. There’s a reason for ‘white flight’ from ‘diverse’ neighbourhoods, after all. And just ask Britain and Europe how all that diversity is working out for them.
There’s nothing so stable, prosperous and safe that white, middle-class ‘progressives’ aren’t keen to remake in the image of their imaginary ‘diverse’ utopias. Whether its California leftists fleeing the state they made to Texas, and then voting for the same policies that ruined California, or smug tree-changers wanting to turn quiet rural towns into ‘bustling’ inner-city replicas.
Do us all a favour: go home to the city and take your ‘diversity’ with you.
