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Context: after growing up in Mississippi and Alabama, I moved to Vermont to begin the process of working to put a dark past behind me, and to attend college. It has been my first experience living somewhere with four distinct seasons, and I absolutely love it, even the winters. Lately I’ve been reflecting on how part of my childhood was an enormous and unqualified blessing, which is a rare sentiment for me, and how it relates to beauty.
The state of Vermont can be a typical nanny state, the cobalt blue territory of Bernie Sanders and an ingrained belief that more government is the answer to everything. I find most of this annoying, and if I were ever going to start a business that required building, renting, or hiring locally? I would move first. The regulations would make entrepreneurship maddening, most likely impossible.
But there is one, and only one, aspect of Big Government here that I adore: the regulations on billboards and signage.
My adoration for this stems directly from lessons that my childhood preacher taught, which is a notion that would make him roll his eyes at best.