Word: rurals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mumford cites several elements of human experience which young people today ignore or consider irrelevant. One is the relation of rural and urban areas. Mumford can still recall the time when a dime and the subway put you in unspoiled country-side outside New York City; and he maintains doggedly that recapturing the rural experience is essential to the "renewal of life" which he envisions for this country. To this end, he envisions an ideal pattern for future societies: a polynuclear, regional development of moderate size cities, each surrounded by green belts devoted only to agriculture. The central core would...
...Mumford, the city seems a place where a nineteenth century man--rural, self-sufficient, intellectual--can reach some sort of compromise with modernity. Many young people, however, seem to see positive values in the chaos and closeness of city--a chance to meet other people, and share an almost communal experience...
...strengths-is its single-minded concentration on one Big Problem at a time. In the past four decades, the nation's energies and imagination have been largely absorbed by the specter of economic instability, war, cold war and the nuclear arms race. At the same time, the rural American was becoming the urban American. The Negro became even more restive for social and economic equity. And the great engine of American success, industry, was practically given carte blanche to pollute the air and the water, with no implicit social responsibility to the cities it had helped to build...
...inflation, benefits have to be increased, but perhaps not to the full amount of the surplus. Reform of the Post Office would save at least $1.5 billion, as well as move letters faster, while another $100 million could be found by asking whether it still makes sense for the Rural Electrification Administration to subsidize rural cooperatives with 2% loans. Congress should also be shamed into cutting the $4.6 billion a year that goes for pork-barrel public-works projects. The nation owes a great deal to its veterans, but there is a question as to whether it need pay them...
Many of the other keen, questing intellects also left. Johnson was always a man who took public issues personally; dissent of any kind became increasingly intolerable to him. With many intellectuals in loud and often unreasonable opposition, his old feelings of insecurity and inferiority about his rural background and mediocre education became more pronounced...