Word: suburbias
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Unlike Cambridge--where everything that you might need, and any daily activity in which you might participate, is within reach by foot--suburbia calls for survival by automobile. Now, cars in and of themselves aren't evil contraptions. But reliance on these impersonal person-movers furthers the atomization of life. A trip to the store provides little or no opportunity to engage in the civic life of the community, if there is even a community at the "heart" of suburbia. The automobile has had the doubly adverse effect of destroying small towns and villages from the inside, by clogging...
...Harvard students living on campus, we have our entire world arranged around us, and in this synthesis of work and school and housing and worship and entertainment we thrive as members of the community. As adults living in suburbia later on, our work will be apart from our housing, and both separate from places of worship and houses of entertainment. We should appreciate the moment, but we should also move to alter the zoning codes in our home communities. The organically coherent life which we lead here can be exported to the rest of America so that the country...
...better at home: Dad is passive, Mom is aggressive; her elder brother is a computer nerd and the leader of a hopeless garage band; her little sister is a tattletale in a tutu, meanly waltzing off with such love as can survive in the cold climate of split-level suburbia...
...seem oblivious to the fact that advertising should, at the very least, never be ugly. The mere sight of this brood, at picnics and on porch swings, could make one long for the disturbing Energizer bunny. Moreover, the ads try to satirize American life's most overcaricatured theme, retro suburbia. Memo to Ogilvy & Mather: let them run down...
...Even suburbia is getting into the act. When I arrived home for Thanksgiving, I asked my sister what was new at her school. "We put condoms on wooden penises in English class today," she informed me. I learned that my alma mater, Roslyn High School, located on Long Island's North Shore, has become the first school district outside New York City to distribute condoms in addition to thorough condom education. What an honor...