It's funny, I was thinking about this recently while reading a (slightly embellished) John Steinbeck memoir called Travels with Charley: in Search of America.

It's funny, I was thinking about this recently while reading a (slightly embellished) John Steinbeck memoir called Travels with Charley: in Search of America. He wrote it when he decided to take a nationwide road trip in the early '60s, and it captured a lot of interesting anecdotes about the birth of modern American lifestyles. One of those was Steinbeck's fascination with "mobile homes", which are the pre-fab houses that you see in trailer parks. When he took his road trip, they were starting to get popular with factory workers. If/when a town's factories shut down, the workers could easily move their homes to where there was work, and he mentioned seeing a lot of them being moved along the highways. But you don't see that very much these days. It seems like people prefer to stay where they are and demand or wait for the work to come back to them, even when they live in mobile housing. There's a lot to be said about the value of a community, but I think this sort of stagnation reflects a precipitous decline in the US' appetite for all sorts of risk over the past few decades. Look at how children are raised, at how strangers are treated, at how slowly new developments proceed. I dunno. It's hard to argue against conservativism in these sorts of situations, because nobody wants to see more child abductions or worksite accidents. But it's hard to deny that we've collectively lost "It", or whatever you want to call that drive to create a city on a hill to provide a beacon of hope and improve humanity's general wellbeing.