I will never understand how social media algorithms work, but for whatever reason, I was fed some videos about a dude who proclaims to be a “lawn dad” and has a bunch of videos of him working on his flawless, impeccably curated lawn. At first, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little at the obvious white privilege I was watching of a white man painstakingly pampering his grass, but I was learning some interesting techniques of lawn care, like leveling out divots.
Eventually, I saw a video of the same dude, and it looked like he was doing some more mowing of his grass, but the caption said something along the lines of removing the morning dew from the grass to reduce moisture and create conditions that could lead to mold, mildew or whatever nasty growth occurs from moisture. But the fact of the matter was that lawn dad was basically squeegeeing his grass, and at this point I was just like what the fuck.
The concern over something so inconsequential to the survival of the human race. The excessive pampering over a concern that is naturally regulated by Mother Nature, the sun and the great outdoors. Calling himself a “lawn dad.”
Yeah, all this bullshit is a whole lot of peak white guy, and probably the whitest content I’ve seen since footage of the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
Now I know a lot of people always recommend, avoid the comments, but when I see something so full of shit, I can’t help but be curious on what is being said in the comments. Fuck it, I often times enjoy reading the comments, because sometimes I discover some really good memes in them, and as long as I don’t participate, there’s few things I enjoy more than seeing some good internet squabbling.
Anyway, I was relieved to see that there were plenty of commenters like me who were weirded out by just how much time and effort lawn dad puts into his lawn, calling him out for having extraordinary amounts of extraneous time, resource, privilege and all sorts of white guy attributes without specifically referring to his whiteness.
Naturally, these responses triggered a tremendous amount of mostly white, white knights, who were more than willing to trade barbs with other commenters calling lawn dad out on his privilege, and it goes without saying that those flinging stones were likely people who were lawn dads in their own right, or were so inspired that they were considering their path to becoming one too.
The point is, lawn dad life is clearly a life without kids or any of the daily struggles that those not from a background of privilege can enjoy themselves. I’m like, motherfucker, have some kids and see if you still have any time left in your life to wick dew or pattern lines into your grass, but that being said, a guy like this probably has a trad wife who does all of the parenting without him so that he can go play around in his yard all hours of the day.
Question is, when election time was in full swing, does a lawn dad dare risk poking holes into his lawn to plant his orange guy political signs, or does the health of his lawn supersede his support for racist bigots?
