Mobility Equals Freedom, Part 2: Driving and Quality of Life

“Everything in life is somewhere else—and you get there in a car.”  -- E.B. White

“Twentieth-century urban America didn’t belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car.  Transportation technologies have always determined urban form.”

– Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011)

 

The following are factors that diminish quality of life as listed in the Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive.  The lead question is this: “When you think about the following scenarios, what would be considered an unacceptable quality of life?”

                         

Not being able to drive a car                 

Not being able to get out of bed

Not being able to leave the house or move around and interact with people (e.g., a coma state)    

 Not being able to have meaningful relationships or recognize family or friends

*

Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions

In other words, not being able to drive is incompatible with quality of life: If I can’t drive, living is no longer worthwhile.   Losing the driving license is the lead-in to a dependent life.  And for Americans, loss of independent mobility equates to a severely compromised state of being. 

The way people move around, and for what reasons, has much to say about opportunity.  How that opportunity is recognized and acted upon, in turn, provides clues about what cultural values are, how they act as deep motives, and how change is seen - as enhancing or blocking the top operating values.  The ability to drive is considered the gateway to many opportunities, and especially to the ability to hold a job—even with remote work as an option. 

In the US, staying put is not regarded as advantageous to individual development.  We all know that to progress, go to a decent school, build a career, get a family started, meet partners and leverage relationships, use marriage as a driver of social capital, we have to seek out new places.  Our country was founded on these tenets as Europe looked west to the new world to realize freedoms not to be found in locked-in Old World centers. 

License to move

The driver’s license is a rite of passage in the US, marking the start of true independence away from the family and obligations to parents.  Independence is the American measure of mental and physical well-being, and also, in a seeming contradiction, the basis for social health and upward mobility.  Independence is a signal of intelligence and social viability through mobility, and the car provides that most effectively.  

What about public transit?  Five percent or less of the American public use commuter trains and buses; even Washington D.C.’s excellent Metro system has just a 10% ridership.  High usage correlates with population density, as in Japan, Hong Kong, New York City, and much of Europe. Edward Glaeser estimates that commutes by public transit are twice that of cars, 48 minutes against 24 minutes, which is why 86% of US commuters opt for the time-saving route.  He gauges the best commute as the brief walk of 15 minutes, less than a mile (Triumph of the City, p. 13).  The time burden is independent of actual distance: “The problem with public transportation is the time involved in getting to the bus or subway stop, waiting to be picked up, and then getting from the final stop to one’s ultimate destination” (179).    

In between is the hybrid of semi-private car services such as Uber and Lyft and vans powered by smart phones at rates closer to taxis than buses.  For most middle-class Americans—and 95% call ourselves middle-class—the price of public transit is not the ticket but the stress of riding with below-middle classes than we’d like to see around us.  In Honolulu, with one of the leading bus systems island-wide, class-mixing is less an issue in the nation’s most diverse state with more equal incomes, but tourists still favor car rentals.  Wills Eye Hospital, in its literature on “Preparing for Hospital Discharge,” warns that “Public transport is not an acceptable form of transportation home from the hospital.”  You need access to a private car and driver just to return home from your treatment.

Mass transit leaves the rider dependent on schedules and stop locations, going against the autonomy principle that one should be able to go wherever and whenever they want, one of our leading cultural core values.  The need to live by someone else’s schedule, often requiring transfers to other parts of the routing, takes a toll on the rider’s time, and this is the core of the problem.  Even waiting in traffic is seen as an acceptable exchange for the ability to travel point to point once the blockage clears.  It is the main advantage of an Uber ride. 

Since Ford’s Model A, cars took off, making the ability to travel long distances the hallmark of the free life.  The driver’s license is the turning point for adolescents into independence and autonomy.  Car ownership makes independence possible.  One car per family of two employed adults is considered a disabled system, just waiting to finance the second car.  Losing that license is the start-point of life’s end, giving up independence to rely on the wheels of others.  For these nondrivers, a city’s dependence on cars is the leading factor for livability.  Los Angles is famous as its own car culture, because of the far-spread geography, but Florida is just as car-centric, as are Seattle and Washington, DC., and even the sprawling Las Vegas strip.   

Quality of life   

In summary, the Pennsylvania’s Advance Health Care Directive (above) features a listing of quality-of-life factors (quality of life being a major measure of wellness in medicine).  Each factor is to be checked only if it is a deal-breaker in end-of-life quality so that the Power of Attorney can see what the patient has determined he/she can’t tolerate.  The list includes: “Not being able to move around and interact with people (such as in a coma)”; “Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions”; “Living in a nursing home”; “Living in constant severe pain,” or--wait for it-- “Not being able to drive a car.” 

This is in line with other measures of life quality.  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) qualifies inability to drive for medical reasons as a disability if it limits performing a major life activity, such as working or engaging in daily tasks.  For a broad class of jobs (including driving itself), driving is a major life activity.  The largest class of male workers are those employed in driving activities.

The car question is the only item on the list of 13 that is not a medical issue, including “Not being able to live on my own.”  And, in deference to the American bias toward independence, “being able to live on my own” is the last right the aging population is willing to give up, the strong bias being independence, as in "aging in place."  In many cultures, this would be a highly unwanted state of things--being unable to live with relatives would be the non-starter.  For Americans, NOT living alone and not driving to and from that home are the deal-breakers.  But before independent living, independent driving takes first place in defining quality of life.  Even teens of driving age can create a world of their own away from the family home.

In a world increasingly urban and densely populated, and in the face of climate change, the power of the automobile to dictate mobility and housing options is coming under increasing pressure to resolve the issues of cultural values: autonomy and independence.  Already these issues are showing high costs to society as well as the individual.  What eventual solutions can be devised to resolve the pragmatic costs that threaten our embedded beliefs?

* Images from KODA, Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive (2024)  

Mobility Equals Freedom

 

Pixabay images

"I have heard you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don't want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and die."
                                                                       - Chief Satanta, Kiowa

 

In our cultural studies inventory of values, America’s top motivators—mobility comes close to the top, just below The Individual is the Core of American Life.  Freedom to be oneself is closely tied to freedom of movement (and assembly); the right to choose your location and social base supersedes the traditional value of family as our key to identity.  This is why we believe in love rather than family obligations as the prime motivator for marriage.  At the mobility end of the scale, a common reason given for not taking on the care of older relatives is that this caregiving would stand in the way of the caretaker’s right to travel. Not even actual travel, but the cultural value placed on the right to mobility.  

Historian Yoni Applebaum opens his Atlantic article on the mobility = freedom equation with this salvo:

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation.  It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.  (p. 34)

The author’s tracing of mobility identifies the nineteenth century as the height of moving, with a third of all Americans changing address every year.  Moving Day on May 1 was a national celebration--of a giant house swap.  Along with the willingness to move comes progress and opportunity for new work, society, status, and outlook.  For Americans, moving is taken as a positive sign of free choice to improve circumstances and relationships—beyond a bigger or better house.  This is the main reason families are so far-flung and distant.  “Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic.” 

“But,” cautions Applebaum, “over the past fifty years, the engine of American opportunity has stopped working.”  In 1960, one of every five Americans in any given year moved house.  In 2023, just one in thirteen moved.  “The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century.” 

Why is this occurring?  The population is aging, and people move far less when they are older; the US median age was 16 in 1800, 39 today.  Houses cost more, much more.  People can switch jobs and work remotely without moving.  There are more homeowners than ever—and homeowners move less than renters.  Two-income households are trickier to place in new jobs, another reason moving has slowed.  And joint custody arrangements keep more divorced parents in place until kids move away. 

Where housing is affordable, jobs are scarce – whereas the highest-profile rich enclaves do offer housing, just at levels that begin at $1 million.  This housing versus opportunity ratio is at the root of the culture wars between working-class and privilege.  “The freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.”

But perhaps even more important are the many housing regulations that have widened the inequality gap. Such codes, now rampant, keep new owners and tenants out of places that used to be accessible: landmarked historic areas, segregated-usage zones, and anti-construction domains, are there to prevent adaptive reuse and the demon watchword, growth. In step with homeowner associations, environmental sanctuaries, and gentrified local control.  In the name of preserving quality of life, these measures keep people in place by stopping most incursion by less-desirable groups.    

Here is my letter to the Commons, The Atlantic’s editorial page:

Ref: The Atlantic, “Stuck in Place: why Americans stopped moving house and why that’s a very big problem,” Yoni Applebaum, March 2025  

Tracking the American moving record reveals values central to American culture.  In my work as a cultural analyst and Americanist, mobility stands in the top tier of” deep culture” motives that make us who we are.  Our historic willingness to pull up and replant roots underlies the constant search for our ideal identity, community, and future. Indirectly, though, Applebaum hits upon the paradox at the heart of mobility.

This happens when our leaning toward equality and tolerance (on the way up in the journey to realize selfhood) then starts to mitigate against the striving of aspiration and class-raising—as seen in the relentless competition for elite college admission.  This striving takes over career, marriage, and, as here, in the prestige address as the control center (rather than the European castle) to manage all these enterprises.  Focused strivers quickly enter the playoffs to fill the fewer and fewer places at the top — including housing.  This produces hierarchy, not equality.  Rarity itself is what endows the “lovely house” of the Millionaire Next Door with its multi-million-dollar value.   

And because it is location, location, location that prices real estate, desirable addresses also become self-valuated at a rising clip, going to the highest bidders; if everyone wanted to live in mixed-residential neighborhoods, they would command the highest listing scores.  We don’t buy houses; we buy homes with fixed addresses.  The Cleveland Parks, the Main Lines, are enclaves in which to cluster with like-minded neighbors with compatible values proven by net worth.  Those who have worked for a lifetime to reach a residential goal are loathe to start sharing it out among the not-yet-certified (with college as the qualifier).  Doing so would be, they figure, a matter of compromise that devalues their own achievement: that of creating a community of excellence for mutual benefit among high achievers.  Inviting incursion by lesser others is not on the agenda (although marginally possible to pull off).  Why would you, your children, and their children willingly diminish such a sought-after prize if, as the author avers, “where you raise them” is the highest-leverage factor in success?  And, frankly, the built-in target of college recruiters is the wealthy enclave.

The right to make our own decisions, about where we live as well as our college, career, and spouse (the car completes the high-ticket list) is one of negotiation, balanced by the dreams and decisions, hard work and investment, of others: it is socially construed.  We must always operate—and dream—within and around the social order and its cultural agenda of power and values. 

Singer John “Denver’s own choice was to make laws to keep his favorite state Colorado’s population from growing.  The land would remain beautiful by denying entry to the many who wanted to move there--after he himself was securely settled.  Since he wrote “Rocky Mountain High,” the state’s population doubled. Another unintended consequence, surely.

Bias Widening, Part 2 – Bias and Discovery

 

Bias Widening, Part 2 – Bias and Discovery

 

“Any choice of evidence depends upon the mindset of the observers."

 --Robert Burton, MD, On Being Certain (2008) *

 

Bias and discovery

Bias toward one set of ideas and against another can either keep knowledge inert—or lead to testing those beliefs to reveal new, contrary ones that work better to define and solve problems. Steven Johnson’s social history of ideas (Where Good Ideas Come From, 2010) gives the example of Joseph Priestley’s discovery that plants expel the oxygen that supports earth’s atmosphere.  The common scientific wisdom until the late 1700s was that without oxygen, plants would die.

But in a simple bell jar experiment, they proved this bias wrong by thriving.  This proof was part of Priestley’s exploration of the nature of air itself.  He is credited for isolating oxygen as an element, in effect “discovering” oxygen. 

Idea bias

Reversing a fundamental bias has been basic to breakthrough paradigm shifts, described by Thomas Kuhn in The Nature of Scientific Revolutions as the recognition of data anomalies as clues that could reveal mistaken—or merely limited—idea bias.  The move from earth-centered to the sun-centered universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the discovery of the genetic code by DNA illustrate the ability of scientists to overcome and surpass accepted truth by revisioning the world. 

“In order to pursue long-range thoughts, we must derive sufficient reward from a line of reasoning to keep at the idea yet remain flexible and willing to abandon the idea once there is contrary evidence,” notes Robert Burton, MD, in On Being Certain (2008).  Burton points to the central problem of certainty:  Feeling certain arises from “involuntary mental sensory systems,” neurological, not rational, that attach and become embedded in the ideas themselves.  So “complete objectivity is not an option,” because we can’t separate our ideas from our devotion to their “rightness.” 

The feeling of knowing in fact can easily become the enemy of certainty, because it regularly betrays us—as everyone knows who has bet on a sure thing that failed to fulfill the promise of coming true; at the racetrack, casino, career path, voting polls, or romantic engagement.

Contrary evidence must be overwhelming and undeniable—and yet, even in the face of contrary proof, we can maintain the original notion in the process of “cognitive dissonance.”  Bias is just one example of the ways that “feeling right” controls thinking.  Better thinking-–a function of feeling--might lead us to rationally debunk ideas that don’t serve us well but become built into the way we process information and experience.  As Burton puts it, “The continuing belief that we can strip our ideas of biases runs deep and isn’t limited to those with a marginal understanding of [brain] science” (p. 157).

Consciousness and culture

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious (2021) links the search for human consciousness through the brain to the rise of culture.  He points to the role of pain and suffering in the start-up to creative problem solving.  To counter the negative outcomes of physical and psychic damage (and death), our minds became attuned to finding solutions aimed at avoiding and preventing all manner of less-desirable states—physical, mental, and emotional. In this way, culture was the emergent outcome of our need for at least basic safety and security in all our many operations.

At the same time, well-being, pleasure, and joy inspired efforts and innovations to promote these states (beyond security) as the baseline for civilization and its promise of protections, again through creativity and shared beliefs.  Our intellectual resources allowed for a collective bias against pain and promoting pleasure to prevail.  The uniting consciousness of death, even beyond its suffering, is the powerful motive behind religion.  This is the human attempt to deal with the inevitable yet unpredictable end of life—that is, for the person, the end of everything, evident from Greek tragedy and the Bible—and continuing.

* DNA image – Pixabay   

Bias Widening by Connecting Ideas Part 1 - Idea Flow

Bias Widening by Connecting Ideas     

Part 1: Idea Flow

                                            Italian Hill Village – Pixabay image

“By challenging basic assumptions, it’s possible to stumble upon simple and unusual solutions to long-standing problems….It’s important to look for discoveries outside the usual suspects—[for] hypotheses worth disproving.….I’m able to pull from disciplines and subcultures that rarely touch one another….”   

                                                                    --Tim Ferriss, transformation guru

Ideas can widen, travelling outward from original preconceptions—that is, bias--by immersion in idea networks that challenge and tweak that bias.  For Europe, these networks were cultivated in the hill towns of northern Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance.  This enterprising incubator brought together both distant and ancient cultures as sources for innovation and invention.  The dominance of the church gave way to alternate worlds. 

Exposure to other operating assumptions for doing things yields new concepts of problems and new approaches to solving them.  Getting beyond the limiting influence of bias requires other assumptions, other ways of thinking and doing, that is, the igniting of an alternate bias.  Such an alternative can appear in a dominating mind, think-tank, imagination, or another cultural mindset—within a time, people, or profession.

Social historian Steven Johnson points to the idea-combining power of the modern city, starting with the Italian hill villages and their cultivation of ideas essential to the Italian Renaissance (Where Good Ideas Come From, 2010).  The graph of human invention runs parallel to the growth of the pulsing interactive structures of urban life.  These immediate interactions were breakthrough developments distinct from the small isolated groups of hunter-gatherers of prehistory. 

With the agricultural revolution came the marketplaces that anchored settlements of thousands, then many hundreds of thousands.  Trade reached out into a regional, then global scope.  Ideas could flow between people, families, clans, and cultures.  The social webs of large cities in their billions of connections parallel the 100 trillion neural connections of the brain’s activity—the most complex network we know.  The fuzzy logic of search engines likewise now enables the randomized meeting up of subjects far afield from each other.

Limits

The only limit on the flow of ideas was the set of pre-assumptions that always limit acceptance or even consideration of ideas that are different from the assumed truth—the shared beliefs that define and channel our thinking.   Shared reality makes agreement and concerted action possible.  This outcome is the strong suit of conformity. 

Idea transformation works by mixing unlike or unlikely elements by deliberate idea cultivation.  This is the opposite of stovepipe or silo mentality of organizations devoted to keeping information under wraps and out of the flow of shared idea generation by keeping it sequestered in need-to-know vaults and private channels.  Pooled insight or a community of truth is sustained by the intermingled thinking of diverse minds operating on the same circuit—a working definition of culture that also proves the value of thought diversity.

Johnson says on this point, “When you work alone in an office peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases.  The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network” (p. 61-62). The preexisting preferences built into solo work are the essence of bias. They predetermine the way ideas will be generated and then selected out to focus the work on. This is why artists in every field find it hard to resist visiting the same themes over and over, a form of stickiness that can hinder their creative expression and development in exchange for a tried-and-true thing. 

The “liquid network” of ideas is essential to the image of flow as a property of social networks as they cultivate concepts into forms with social value powered by mobility.  Johnson cites the “hybrid economy” as the liquid network combing group R&D efforts built around individual ideas; open networks such as Nike’s open R&D lab or Alex Osborn’s brainstorming, as working out the concepts of the protected genius of private enterprise.  Thomas Edison was famous for his idea brilliance, but it was his team of hardworking scientists who were needed to bring those ideas to fruition. 

In his 2017 graduation address at Harvard, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg deplored President Trump’s stand for isolation and against “the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration” to generate innovation and invention.  

Appropriation Reconsidered

                                                                                                                                                                             ap·pro·pri·a·tion

      /əˌprōprēˈāSH(ə)n/ noun

The action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission.  "The appropriation of parish funds."

 

Example: critics have admonished non-Indigenous people for wearing feathered headdresses or traditional regalia as costumes for Halloween.

 

Reproductions of iconic landmarks in Las Vegas 

 From language to the herding of food animals, inventions quickly become community property.  At least predating intellectual property law, the term “cultural appropriation” was nonexistent.  Culture is essentially the development of shared property, sourced between cultures, across time.  It is not proprietary to individuals or to even groups. 

The modern wish to own and control familiar icons, expressions, even possessions, and to determine how and by whom they can be used, is a limited, non-historical, and idealized notion balancing control over artifacts and ideas against the natural need to innovate, borrow, and connect.  With the advent of major cities from Rome onward, the world became a stage for models of idea-sharing and the dynamic of a creative commons. 

Even the settlements of the most recent Ice Age saw the flowering of arts and invention, on the way to the shared wealth of cultural exchange. Since the Middle Ages, cultural acceleration worldwide gave us the mechanical clock, printing press, the compass, and paper money (with China a major contributor).  At least historically, it is not an act of bullying, in which what’s yours is taken away to become mine—the “without permission” edge of appropriation--but the connectivity of cultures that has been key to their development and flourishing.

The shared mental construct of language—we don’t know when language was first born, or where - is the shared legacy of many thousands of years by the billions of homo sapiens.  As more dominant economies produce and disseminate products, ideas, images, and stories, it becomes clear that these have contrasting functions and meanings across cultures and varying impacts as well.  World culture is a marketplace of ideas that shapes both originators and adaptors.  Imports also show a valuing of the foreign for its own sake, as in French wine and cuisine, Russian caviar, and Italian cars.   American films, jeans, tobacco, and music are world exports long shared as first-world status symbols.  As Americans, this wide adoption of our icons is accepted as a natural process along with the rise of democratic rule.

The adaption of Buddhism to American ideals, and its understanding in the contemporary US as against its ancient Indian origins and Chinese dominance, is another case in point.  The Japanese tea ceremony is an unrepeatable “transience” experience.  Christianity is worldwide, but the practice and ideology looks different even between North and South America, vividly apparent in the contrast between Anglo and Latin themeing of churches. 

 

Appropriation is a decision-making process of group evolution.  Of all the possible choices we make, none are pre-determined; experimentation leads to finding the imported solutions and accommodation that make the most sense and therefore, over time, catch on.  When times change, the desire for and use of imports (like foreign loan words) change, leaving most in the dust.  The universal bias toward copying, importing, sharing, and improving can be read in the history of trade (imports and exports).  

 

This dissemination can be handed back to the authentic origin, sometimes without recognition that it was even adapted by Culture B from Culture A.  St. Patrick’s Day, for example, is heavily celebrated in Ireland only because American tourists have come to expect it to be celebrated as in the US (which it never was, by tradition), making March 17 a large share of tourist revenue.  Before this, it was a day of worship wearing a shamrock complete with roots and dirt.   Tivoli Gardens, inspired by Italy, was adopted in Copenhagen where it began the process of inspiring the theme park in the mind of a tourist, Walt Disney.  Inspiration and adaptation are in no way cultural appropriation but an example of the power of the open flow of ideas. 

 

 Seashell and cowrie (snail) beads have been described as the original personal decoration (“adornment” in anthropology).  Both personal and social identity can be communicated—and are still—by the jewelry we wear.  The beads go back 300,000 years and are touted as the start-point of self-awareness and social status.  But this doesn’t account for less durable goods, like flowers, seeds, wood, feathers, and other perishable “pre-jewelry.”

“Sudden events” have long obscured long-term origins, says archaeologist Alexander Marshack in The Roots of Civilization (1991). Marshack proposes the concept of “cognitive archaeology,” the record of how homo sapiens have seen, abstracted, symbolized, and imaged their world in time and space as a way of dealing with reality.  He calls this approach “a part of the ongoing and broadening inquiry into the nature of being human.”  His analysis of the African Ishango bone for its mathematical genius and the transition from the lunar to solar calendar illustrate this cumulative appreciation of culture. 

“Transhumance” was mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski’s term for cultural evolution beyond the biological, spanning many eons, back beyond Ice Age inventions.  In his exploration for “great moments of human invention” he notes: “In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world…. That series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution…. Man ascends by discovering the fulness of his own gifts.”  (The Ascent of Man, 2013).

Like following reindeer herds, which the Lapps continue to do, group inventions quickly become community property.  Cultural appropriation has only suddenly been invented in the sense of unjustified purloining--which it clearly is not. Denim jeans are an American creation. Should they be restricted only to the American-born? In some countries they are considered a status symbol, and you will be approached on the street with offers to buy the ones you are wearing.  American Cultural innovations over time are enduring as untitled public goods: the accumulated property of all generations.  Since language, fire, tools, and weapons, the pencil, Mercator map, and the theory of evolution, this common wealth has accelerated the pace of progress from the calculating machine to the current artificial intelligence frontier.

 

The mark of multiculturalism is a global culture that emerged thousands of years before the digital age or the World Wars.  This ongoing traffic in ideas, objects, and practices is a mapping of memes that enjoy a life of their own by repetition, imitation, and morphing.  A French Academy can’t hope for a pure French language or expect its speakers to bar “foreign” elements. When you teach me how to read, that transfer doesn’t subtract from your abilities in reading—nor in your further ability to teach innumerable others.

Wherever invented, no group or locale has a lock on the idea of either written or spoken language, nor what is written or spoken within them.  This is the way culture works – and in fact, what it is.  Its higher values are what make it a unique civilization or singular cultural influence on the rest of the planet, not just its content, its museum of people, places, and things.   Do Brits complain about “colonials” holding high tea?  This ritual looks different in Bangalore than in Birmingham, because shaped by the borrowing culture, keeping some elements while letting go of others as less consonant with its needs.  On the other hand, the pineapple and Boxing Day in Great Britain are Christmas symbols that never mingled with American yule traditions. These are rooted in invisible but highly active class values.

 The complex nature of culture and cultures, now a global showcase for interacting material, ethical, and economic processes, causes the journey of appropriation to become widespread, rapidly evolving, and tricky to model or track.  Overall, mass media and social media have made the mapping of material and social diffusion increasingly complicated.  One thing is certain: Cultural exchange is happening at an increasing rate and will not be slackening anytime soon.  We can only look to the collective fruits of that exchange over time as a promise, not a threat, of more to come.