January 26, 2004 -Liberal Thinking at the Farmer’s Market

Two months ago the dedicated staff of edhat.com prowled the parking lot of Camino Real Marketplace in search of bumper stickers.  The goal was to read the writing on the fenders to check out viewpoints and feelings among Costco members and others who travel to the Goleta shopping Mecca to satisfy their purchasing needs.  Overall, we did not find much that day … mostly stickers for UCSB, sports teams, and radio stations.

On Saturday, the dedicated staff tried the same thing in a different place.  This time we went to the Saturday Morning farmer’s market in downtown Santa Barbara – a bastion of liberalness, we thought. No doubt there would be old VW wagons plastered with peace signs and Grateful Dead stickers.

The Stickers We Saw

Low and beyond, our instincts were correct.  It was a “bumper” crop of liberal stickers by the market.  In fact, 47% of all the stickers we saw touted some liberal belief, most of them closer to Ralph Nader than Al Gore.  The other 53% were a mix of wisdom, schools, religion, travel, and patriotism.  The 3 main areas of liberal expression were:

Environmental - mostly advocating the saving of a piece of land in-our-own-backyard (Gaviota, San Marcos Foothills, Elwood, the Ocean, the Beach);

Political – Kucinich (the only candidate we found) and Pro-choice were the dominant ones ... KPFK (Pacifica Radio), too. We also saw a sticker for No Recall … time to get out the razor blade on that one;

Antiwar - peace, peace signs, doves, “Peace is Patriotic”, “War Is Not The Answer”, etc.

It was fun to see some of the old liberal standard amongst the mix;

“It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombs”

“Join the army. Travel to exotic distant lands.  Meet exciting unusual people and kill them”

Although we did not see any VW buses or Grateful Dead stickers, the most prevalent bumper sticker we saw was “Peace”. Many of our subscribers had given Peace a chance in our contest. A random drawing chose EdIt as the winner of two movie tickets.

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