the streets are dangerous

Anywhere in the world now, the entire machinery of education, government and media is devoted to one thing: convincing people that the streets are dangerous and that they should stay home and, by inference, turn over their lives to some polite, sophisticated crackpot institution (i.e. themselves). Occasionally, in some rap song, I get a notion that there is something to be learned in the streets besides bloodshed, but no other medium advances such subversive knowledge. Take away the streets and you take away freedom of movement, people's innocence, their right to gaze, create, respond, discover anything new. If the 19th century is the study of how the people, often in a misguided form, took the streets from the king and queen, the 20th century is the study of how they returned the streets to a series of "democratic" institutions that supposedly represented the interests of the people, but found increasingly ingenious ways to get people off the street. They have succeeded because most town and cities in the U.S. at 6:30 on any given evening are deserts of concrete and glass. Cross the border from Mexico into the United States, and cleanliness and order strike the eye, not life. The great science of the 20th century, then, is not nuclear fission or aerodynamics but crowd control refined to the point of crowd elimination.

Guillermo O'Joyce, from an essay on Irving Stettner (which can be found in his Miller, Bukowski  & their Enemies)