Farmers and Teachers Should Be Our Real One Percent!

A lot of our food comes from California. The farmland between here and San Francisco is crazy Republican. Dude, you go up there, you see these anti-abortion billboards and pro-Trump billboards. Oh my goodness. It's like a different world. It's so crazy because it's the world of the people who have to work from fucking dawn till like 7pm and then they crash and they go back to the farm again. They're always trying to keep it together. Fuck man. When it comes to farmers, there's one thing you get a lot of. You get a lot of religion. It's not a value judgment, but you get a lot of religion and you get a lot of Republicans. You get a lot of that. It's not that common that you get farmers. Liberal farmers. There are a few. There's certainly some organic farmers that are real progressive liberal people that understand the importance of growing your own food. Mass farmers, like when farmers are growing corn to feed cows, those kind of farmers, there's nothing wrong with that. They need them. Those fuckers are a lot of those people are Republican. You got to wonder, maybe it's just like the party of the people that really bust their ass and they want that. That hard working farmer ethic is like there's no room for bullshit in that life. If you got to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and feed the chickens, milk the cows and they do shit all day long and you're barely paying your bills. You don't want to hear any bullshit. You don't want to hear any bullshit. I think a lot of them are Republicans because Republicans stands for this no bullshit perspective on life. They think the Democrats want to hand out their money and take too much of their taxes, but it's because of their reality. It's because of the reality of this particularly grueling occupation these people have taken on. It's almost like a mistake of perspective. They don't have an opportunity to see things openly, like see the whole world and see where their position is. They have a uniquely difficult position. They might think the whole world is like that, but it's not necessarily. You just chose something that's a preposterous endeavor. I mean that in an admirable way. I'm going to be admiring farmers' work ethic. Have you took a regular person, you or me, who's never worked like that ever and say, Oh man, you and Joe are going to get up at five o'clock in the morning. You're going to feed the chickens and milk the cows and gather up the eggs. You're going to work all fucking day, man, and you're barely going to make any money and you're going to have crazy loans and you're going to need to be subsidized by the goddamn government. No, man. You have so much depression and suicide and when their farms collapse, man, it's fucking devastating and there's some people who could do it too. There's some people who do it and they become very successful and there's some people who do it and love it and swear by it. I mean, there's a whole spectrum, but that has got to test you. And if you think about how crazy that is, that that's not more lucrative. What is more valuable to us than our food? And why do we treat them that way? Exactly. It's like, what else is more valuable? Our teachers. Why do we treat them that way? It's consistent. There's so many people who get paid so little who are so valuable. What a fucked up society. It's backwards, man. What is more valuable? There's number one is stay alive. That's number one. How do you do that? You need food. Okay. The people like food. We should take so good care of them. They should be the 1%. They should be the priests. Yes. They should be taken care of. The givers of fruit. They literally bring you fruit and you give them paper and you get their fruit and it sustains you. But they struggle it. And then number two is teachers. You got to learn something. What do we do with our teachers? We take them. We pay them dog shit. We stick them in front of 50 kids. Barely paying attention. And you just hope to make an impact on... I'm sure you have a few teachers that said a thing at one point in time. You're like, okay. Teachers do make a difference. Yeah. Mr. Friedenberg, you'll never be able to draw a woman until you've had a woman. I appreciate that. I was like, oh, I got to give me a woman. Oh, shit. That's a Bill Withers line. That sounds like a song. Yeah. Mr. Friedenberg. God damn. I had one guy who was a Vietnam vet, who was a heavy guy. He was heavy. And he was in middle school when I was in... I was in the Mary Curley Middle School in Jamaica, Jamaica Plains, which is... At the time, it was a real sketchy neighborhood outside of Boston. Not a suburb of Boston, but inner city. We moved there from Florida. And that was the only place we could afford when I was a kid. And this was like 17-year-old kids in my seventh grade class. It was so ridiculous. I'm not exaggerating, man. Yeah, it was maybe eighth grade. I forget. But there was this one teacher anyway. And he was a science teacher. And he would grow his own radishes. And he kept saying, all I need is radishes and salt. And that's my lunch. And I grew my lunch. And I'm thinking, wow. This guy's out there growing his lunch. Out here in the city. But this is the big thing he said to me. He goes, you ever want to hurt your head? He goes, just go outside and look up at space and realize how big it is. Try to imagine something that has no end. If you really want to hurt your brain, just try to imagine that space has no end. That fucked me up, dude. I was like 13. I was like, oh my god, he's right. There's no end. And I swear to God, that became a big part of the shift in how I started viewing the world.