It's time to rethink the single-family home as the American dream, author says

[Hortensis]

109. Do you realize that the oldest people around when you

were very young were born before electricity was available, except maybe in the best parts of just a few cities, and that death in childbirth and early childhood and sweeps of death from epidemic disease were NORMAL and expected?

And that the oldest people they knew as children were born in the 1700s? Before the industrial revolution got going and most people still lived much as they had for the past 20,000 years?

From you to that old guy who lived at the same time as you and from him to the old guys who once smiled at him in the Agricultural Age.

Maybe be a little less hard on us?

That's how long ago humanity was like a cattle drover dropped behind the wheel of an unstoppable runaway truck, when no one knew what a truck was, and forced to keep it mostly on the flats and from crashing. It's been a wild ride, but we learn to drive better with a little more control and fewer mistakes every decade, and it's one that's brought unimaginable comfort and health. And far from over.

And here in America that first old guy and his wife who'd left the old ways of old societies behind were homeless and started hacking at the wilderness -- for their lives.