The hate for flatlanders, as I understand it, isn't about property rights in the real sense, but the perception. Most Vermonters wouldn't consider Chittenden county (with fully a third of the population of the entire state) a properly Vermont kind of place to live at all, whatever its job and cultural opportunities. It's not about preserving the right to create sprawl. No one wants the sprawl but the big developers. It's about the perception of freedom. It's about hassles and confusing, restrictive bureaucracies transported from points south with the flatlanders who've moved in with their big bank accounts and taken over local governments. It's about being told what to do. And it is especially about not being able to afford to buy property on the basis of local salaries. It's about money, more than anything.

In the town Chelsea Green is located, you have people complaining about and preventing the installation of windmills and cell phone towers. You have people complaining about the pig farm down the road stinking up the neighborhood. You have a selectboard mostly made up of wealthy interests from out of state making decrees that punish the poor to preserve the illusion of 'rural character' that never really existed to begin with, a planning commission that is wholly devoted to rising property values as a sustainable and admirable goal, with all the spiraling property taxes that come with it. Cops acting like sharks, abusing those who can't afford to follow the law, just helping create an entire underclass of people who are underwater and will never get themselves to a place of comfort no matter how many hours they work, because no job they can get will ever pay enough for them to own a home in the area, because of slum lords who rent out shabby apartments for prices hardly better than Boston, because cars are so expensive and so absolutely necessary to life there, because for as small a community as it is, and with such low unemployment, there is no loyalty on the part of employers. If you slip up at any time, you're done for. If you get sick, you're done for. And no one will help you, no one can help you, because the social divisions mean that you only know the impoverished if you're one of them. The hate is because you can't afford to live your life with dignity if you're a regular joe who stayed in town after high school.

It's class resentment, same as most of the rest of rural America, made so much worse because there are so many from out-of-state, and it's mainly the flatlanders who are doing fine, and it's mainly the young and the local who are struggling. Remember that whole 'Take Back Vermont' thing? It didn't gain so much momentum because people cared so much about homosexuals– it gained momentum because of the class resentment it played upon. It's undirected rage, and it's been at the boiling point for as long as I can remember.