I travel a fair amount, and have commented more than once how homogeneous America is becoming. I would suspect a Best Buys in Fairbanks, Alaska looks a lot like the one in Miami, Florida. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this: economies of scale make things available for purchase by more people.
At the same time, I got to dreaming about the other direction: what if we take the logic of internet niches and reapply them to physical locations? What if internet virtual communities become actual communities? What if groups become so insular that they redevelop their own languages, their own argots (more than has already happened virtually)? What if every city is filled with dozens of unique enclaves that have a passionate interest in X, Y, or Z? What if there are “family zones”, complete with wonderful playgrounds–complete with monkey bars and merry-go-rounds because we are no longer pussies? (I will note that as a child we played tackle football on asphalt, back
in the era when a nurse was on staff and one or the other of us saw her regularly, but never for anything more serious than a skinned knee; we also took turns seeing if our
friends could throw us off the merry go round, and if we could knock our
partner off the see-saw. None of this would have been allowed today at
most schools)
Can we not reimagine Home? Can we not unleash creative potential through freedom to create culture, create belonging, create community spaces in new ways that satisfy our current emotional needs?
There are so many positive possibilities for the future, that it is really sad that so many people are so unimaginative, and so angry, and so self important, that they insist only doom and gloom stand before us, with tyranny a kindness by contrast.
No matter what their rhetoric says, Leftism IN PRINCIPLE levels interesting differences. It levels curiosity. It levels everything that makes life worth living. It is a prison, not least for its most ardent advocates, who simply lack the emotional skill to see how stupid they are, how dull, how insipid, how denuded and empty.