Living on the land, the historical central tenet of American homestead legislation, also fosters a rural chauvinism, a notion that your wife's work regimen, your children's desire to go to the mall, your own inclination to hit the bar - all the urban distractions that cost money and waste precious time - are secondary to the salubrity of the farm. Are not they simply obstacles in the way of the no-nonsense farmer, who pumps his own drinking water and stores his own sewage? Pass by the blacksmith's shop, Hesiod wrote twenty-seven centuries ago. Can these unproductive diversions not be clipped out of the working day, every day, when town, not the farm, is a glow on the nighttime horizon? Keep your children away from town, exhausted on the tractor and in the packing shed, arms at work with the shovel, and their perilous voyage between twelve and twenty might pass in tranquility. Where else can you announce to them in March, "Don't plan anything this summer, you are all in the fruit shed between eight and eight every day." When the Greeks began to live on the land they farmed, the entire history of the Greek city-state, of Western culture, was altered.
- From Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea by Victor Davis Hanson
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