Monday, December 10, 2012

Why people don't pull over for funeral processions anymore

I remember when I moved from California to rural Kentucky some 30 years ago. Not long after arriving, I was driving along a country road and all of a sudden everyone pulled over to the shoulder. Not knowing why, I just did it too. Soon a funeral procession passed by. "Oh wow," I thought in my still Californian brain. "That is so cool."

I had never seen anybody do this, but here in small town America, it still happens. Not so in many other places, as George Neumayr explains:
The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge saw all this coming. When he visited America in the 20th century, he noticed the "extraordinary efforts made, linguistically and in every other way, to keep death out of sight and mind." He spent a month in Florida at Sunshine Haven, a retirement home where the residents were expected to behave like teenagers, "perfectly capable of disporting ourselves on the dance floor, the beach, or even in bed."
Read more here.

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