Quote of the Week: Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz talking, in her new book, Progress, about mid-twentieth century Americans, though I think this is very much a description of 1970's America:

This was, after all, an era during which even babies displayed their insouciance by riding around in the front seat of cars, more often than not in the seat-belt-free laps of their smoking mothers.

Does this make you yearn for a simpler, more blase time? When kids ran free around the neighborhood, as did their pets, without fear of being kidnapped or molested? I suppose those things happened, but we didn't so easily know they happened. We hadn't really developed what Fran Lebowitz calls the "limitless aptitude for dread."

sigh