re: #25 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

It was a barrier even after we expanded west, but the drug trade expanded, as did our agricultural economy. The desert was no longer enough of a barrier for desperate people wanting to escape poverty and drug cartel terror.

The deserts, the Atlantic and the Pacific weren’t so much barriers as filters. Until the age of cheap flight, they assured that we tended to construct ourselves from the bravest, craziest, strongest, most desperate and determined. Add a leavening of criminals. That takes a lot of the mystery out of our armed-outlaw romanticism.