[zdragnar]

My grandfather and his brother (sons of poor immegrants) traveled halfway across the country in their youth with nothing but a motorbike and some tools. They stopped at a farm each night and worked out a deal to do some equipment repair work in exchange for food and a place to sleep.

Those days are long gone. Fewer small family farms, fewer friendly and trusting people, fewer simple things for mechanically minded handy men to fix.

There's a lot of good things progress brings us, though it is often interesting to ponder on what we have lost.

[MisterTea]

> fewer friendly and trusting people,

I honestly blame film/TV and other modern media for implanting anxieties in people via a combination of sensationalist news reports on gruesome crimes and the horror genre which seem to form a feedback loop of mistrust. Before that people had to go out of their way to hear of such grizzly tales in books or newspapers (if they could even read) so most lived in ignorant bliss, unaware of the potential violence lurking in every corner of humanity. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd just like to know when ans why it was we lost out innocence as a society.

[zdragnar]

Sadly, I never got a chance to ask him about it, though I imagine he probably would have had a few stories of inhospitable hosts or people who wanted nothing to do with them as they came through.

Nowadays, people tend to have more worth stealing - including your identity if you happen to have documents in an easily accessible area of your home. Back then, though, there wouldn't have been much worth taking from a small family farm- no TV, cell phones, electronics other than a radio and light fixtures for the most part (this would have been in the 1930's or 40's, I forget which).

One last stay thought: hospitality and community in general were much more central to people's way of life in rural farming communities then- farmers would help each other out with planting and harvesting, share equipment, every person in the community went to the same or one of two churches, etc. People had to rely on each other just to survive.

[mulmen]

It's been over a decade since I worked on a farm but back then it was common during harvest season to have a tractor and disc hooked up in case a fire broke out. Everyone had one set up because it was in everyone's interest to stop the spread ASAP. If your neighbors field caught fire you'd still run your tractor over to help.

[linuxftw]

I'm not worried about being murdered as much as I am being robbed blind of everything that isn't bolted down. The opioid addiction crisis is real.

[alistairSH]

Even at that, the chances of being robbed (national averages, at least) are pretty low - through 2020 they were the lowest since the 1970s. I realize the pandemic caused some spikes, but I can't find numbers for those and if those spikes brought us anywhere near the peaks in ~1980 or ~1990.