暖冬cool夏
这里一年四季温暖如春，没有酷暑没有严寒......
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）
上海方言问题也在被引起重视。国内有些餐馆也限制使用一次性筷子了，但卫生问题又让人担忧了。
问好暖冬，长周末快乐！
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，何弃之有！
“历史在重复，人类又是在重复中前行或是倒退着”，深刻
作者在五十年前描述的趋势至今仍在延续着。
浪费资源从个人到国家是一个普通现象，你去餐馆吃饭，份额特大，16oz的牛排（一磅呀），吃完了再花钱健身。目前美国有22T Debit. 摊到每个tax payer 身上（trump 除外，他尽“亏钱”不交税）181K.
关于城镇化，村落的消失：我的理解是往日的农村变为卫星城镇，往日的城市变得更加高楼大厦。这主要由于农业技术的发展，农业产出率高造成的，不需要那么多耕地。尽管如此，美国仍然是第一大发产品出口国。
关于方言，我经常出差到南方，发现与他们交谈还是有些困难，真心希望大家都讲标准美语。
在当今美国，非法移民就是当年的引进劳工。这也是国会无法通过migration reform bill 的原因。这些非法移民是最廉价的劳动力，而且不受法律保护。
种族歧视：仍然存在，虽然有些法律的保护潜规则式的种族歧视依然存在，特别是在那些传统地区。
历史是重复的，历史又给我们提出了新的挑战，Trump symptom就是一例。
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最同意这句话，而我们也是被神拣选的神的子民。
很好的文章，非常言简意赅，一句顶百句
新三年，旧三，缝缝补补又三年的说法很中国人自己都不去做了，何况美国人。我觉得吧发展经济有时就得有一批追赶时髦的人，真是要本着旧的不去，新的不来思想，要不那些新产品真没了销路，同时很难说生活水平的提高，反映到个人就是生活的品质。
浪费是不应该的，尽量做到少而精吧，我是个比较喜欢买东东的人，暖冬的文章再次提醒我要少买，要买就买些好的，这才能体现生活的品质。品质生活，从精做起。
如你所言，追求奢侈和舒适无罪，但是这样的浪费能不能持续，有一天是不是就无法承受了。
麻烦你帮我删掉第一条有Typo的留言。