Reply #68: But most Americans were silly enough to move to those places

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Those were the trendy places to live. Those were the places that were--still are--touted in the media as being desirable.

There was a mad rush to the Sun Belt beginning in the 1980s. There was a mad rush to the fringes of the metropolitan areas of other cities at the same time, all because people imagined they could live as country gentry.

Nobody held a gun to their heads to force them to move there. Yeah, yeah, they "couldn't afford a house otherwise." They fell for one of the biggest scams in the history of America: thinking that they had to own a house, whether they could afford it or not. They paid a dollar to the bank to get 30 cents back from the government.

I actually warned people not to do that. I told them that gas prices wouldn't stay low forever. But I was a killjoy treehugger.

People consistently VOTED DOWN transit in the suburbs because they imagined that (gasp!) dark-skinned people might venture out to their little dream world.

That's what happens when people don't think ahead. They end up wanting to risk the health of the planet so that they can go on living in their media-manufactured dream world.

Maybe next time they'll vote for bus service and realize that it's not dark-skinned people who are the enemy. Maybe the next time they have to move they'll opt for a smaller house, closer in.

That squawking isn't just suburbanites with three cars dealing with high gas prices. It's also chickens coming home to roost.