暖冬cool夏
這裏一年四季溫暖如春，沒有酷暑沒有嚴寒......
1）American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness. (P.26)
2）….The big towns are getting bigger and the villages smaller. The hamlet store, whether grocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization. Our treasured and nostalgic picture of the village store, the cracker-barrel store where an informed yeomanry gather to express opinion and formulate the national character, is very rapidly disappearing. People who once held family fortresses against wind and weather, against scourges of forest and drought and insect enemies, now cluster against the busy breast of the big town. (p71-72)
2）The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. … And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside. This prophecy is underwritten by the tendency of the rich to do this already. Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to. (P.72)
2）Since I hadn’t seen the Middle West for a long time many impressions crowded in on me as I drove through Ohio and Michigan and Illinois. The first was the enormous increase in population. Villages had become towns and towns had grown to cities. The roads squirmed with traffic; the cities were so dense with people that all attention had to be devoted to not hitting anyone or being hit. (p.105)
3）It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, package and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. (p.106)
I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going. … What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless. (p. 107)
4）We Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat. (p.64)
These Canucks were a hardy people. They traveled and camped by families and groups of families, perhaps even clans: men, women, boys, girls, and small children too. (p64)
4）Most of these people traveled in big trucks covered with dark canvas tarpaulins, but there are some trailers and a few camper tops like Rocinante. At night some slept in the trucks and trailers, but there were tents pitched in pleasant places,….(p.69）
上海方言問題也在被引起重視。國內有些餐館也限製使用一次性筷子了，但衛生問題又讓人擔憂了。
問好暖冬，長周末快樂！
Actually it was discouraging when I could not produce a book report in English. I tried, but the writing was so poor that I had to give up. Neither could I write something else good.
The word" trudging" in your last post is a good choice, and I happened to come across in the book when the author describe the way a tired Negro walked. Good for you!
As for problems, there are always going to be problems, American or Chinese, French or Italian. But I as an immigrant, benefited from these problems. If it were not for capitalism, American greed and wastefulness, globalization, etc., I probably won't be here. The Tao said it the best, 人之不善，何棄之有！
“曆史在重複，人類又是在重複中前行或是倒退著”，深刻
作者在五十年前描述的趨勢至今仍在延續著。
浪費資源從個人到國家是一個普通現象，你去餐館吃飯，份額特大，16oz的牛排（一磅呀），吃完了再花錢健身。目前美國有22T Debit. 攤到每個tax payer 身上（trump 除外，他盡“虧錢”不交稅）181K.
關於城鎮化，村落的消失：我的理解是往日的農村變為衛星城鎮，往日的城市變得更加高樓大廈。這主要由於農業技術的發展，農業產出率高造成的，不需要那麽多耕地。盡管如此，美國仍然是第一大發產品出口國。
關於方言，我經常出差到南方，發現與他們交談還是有些困難，真心希望大家都講標準美語。
在當今美國，非法移民就是當年的引進勞工。這也是國會無法通過migration reform bill 的原因。這些非法移民是最廉價的勞動力，而且不受法律保護。
種族歧視：仍然存在，雖然有些法律的保護潛規則式的種族歧視依然存在，特別是在那些傳統地區。
曆史是重複的，曆史又給我們提出了新的挑戰，Trump symptom就是一例。
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最同意這句話，而我們也是被神揀選的神的子民。
很好的文章，非常言簡意賅，一句頂百句
新三年，舊三，縫縫補補又三年的說法很中國人自己都不去做了，何況美國人。我覺得吧發展經濟有時就得有一批追趕時髦的人，真是要本著舊的不去，新的不來思想，要不那些新產品真沒了銷路，同時很難說生活水平的提高，反映到個人就是生活的品質。
浪費是不應該的，盡量做到少而精吧，我是個比較喜歡買東東的人，暖冬的文章再次提醒我要少買，要買就買些好的，這才能體現生活的品質。品質生活，從精做起。
如你所言，追求奢侈和舒適無罪，但是這樣的浪費能不能持續，有一天是不是就無法承受了。
麻煩你幫我刪掉第一條有Typo的留言。