HAVE YOU NOTICED, PROGRESS AIN'T FREE!

Progress is like a perfect summer day, everyone's all for it. But progress, even perfect summers, has its price. Take two examples:

* Throughout human history, half the human race has been consistently denied its rights. Throughout half the world this is still true. Not in the West where women have at long bitter last started to assert themselves and their place in the sun. Here they can take special satisfaction in this progress.

However -- always seems to be a however in such matters! -- we have the strange example of many women being pushed into progress perhaps faster than they would wish. For every 10 women who publicly wish for a powerful career, how many privately wish the culture would equally bless their desire to be a wife-and-mother? I have no idea the percent, but I do have an idea this is a less publicized but not less qualified number of such women,

It's almost ironic, isn't it, that now men are free to fulfill their wish to be a House-Husband at exactly the same time being a House-Wife is sniffed at like last week's fish. Perhaps in the press for long-delayed progress, the women's movement has forgotten not every woman wants to move out of home-hearth-and-family.

* In a parallel shift, there has been a movement in our cities to also make them more modern, more today, more sophisticated. But in this well-intentioned progress of grand parks, architecture and transit systems, here too a price. In our splendid rush to make our city's sleeker, gentrified, more homogenized, what's happened to those many small inelegant enclaves we once affectionately called "the neighborhood?"

Most metropolitan dwellers today have little memory and often even less interest in the way-it-was. The way neighbors knew neighbors over back-fence conversations, in local taverns, in local mom&pop store trips, and in evening strolls down the block to the echo of playing children and barking dogs. Harder to do in today's cities where doors are shut, front porches are no more, and being "neighborly" means a quick honk of the car horn as you and they leave in the morning to entirely different worlds.

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It's been said, to know who you are you have to remember who you were. What's true of us, is also true of our cities...