Sinead, there wasn’t much supposing to be done. That’s just how people in small towns treat newcomers (like Jordan). I live in rural America and was just telling Jordan, how he looked through my eyes. Given the way the rural-urban divide in this country is playing out in our politics, you’d think city people would stop telling us how we look to them and start asking, how they look to us.

Jordan was a victim of his small mind — not racism. We call it the little pond syndrome.

In the big city, there are millions of Jordans. Big city fishbowls are so big, Jordan’s just a teeny tiny guppy. When Jordan found himself in a small town fishbowl, he felt so big, he thought he was a whale. Moreover, in this town Jordan was the rarest of whales — he was a white one. When people treated Jordan like a guppy, he decided they were racists. Well, people treated Jordan like a guppy, because he was a guppy. Even now, all these years later, Jordan still thinks like a guppy.

Guppies have such small minds, they keep them closed up tight. Whales’ minds are so big, they keep them wide open. If Jordan was a whale of a reporter, he would have used his time in that small town, to learn everything he could about small town life. But our small-minded city boy proved he was just a guppy.