Wrap-Up of Travels Cont'd

• There is now a preponderance of dollar stores throughout the US. Dollar Tree on the West Coast, Dollar General in the South, and Dollar Family in the Southwest, from what I've seen. These places are basically usurious: the same shit products you can find in the grocery store are here, just with reduced portions to justify the low prices, and maybe even more so. Wares are terrible quality and disintegrate within weeks, perhaps spewing poisons and adding negative value, along with the shit food. The poor then are continuously buying and renting and never achieving true ownership. Plus the health problems. But every business has to make a profit no?
• In New Mexico and Arizona, blue and red lights have been added to worker and maintenance vehicles curiously enough, perhaps to command the fear and discretion that police and other emergency vehicles enjoy. A quick search says yes. Once again, there has been a profound loss of public purpose. You see people speeding through construction zones all of the time, endangering workers. A little fear seems to get em back in line, at least artificially and temporarily. But then that has costs...
• Are we on our way to greener transportation? Anyone? Well we'd like to say yes, though electric cars aren't a serious solution. And wherever one passes through suburbs, one finds universally the sinking of limited budgets into freeway widening. Alas, suburb design requires cars. Capitalism requires constant growth, and cultivates the taste for suburban living and personal autos in the process. Freeways must be widened then. 
• In New Mexico, this issue is a bit more low-key, but as soon as one enters Arizona, the inner and outer exploitation of Native American groups becomes part of the ad landscape. They're not even Indians, but anyway come in and buy some Indian jewelry. Kitsch tepees and cave drawings litter the landscape. Purveyors of genocide are appropriating cultural artifacts and selling them. Well, some indigenous people need to make a living. But here's a granular account of the implications of that.
• Re indigenous groups: how about reparations and land grants for starters? 
• Re cultural appropriation: the West needs to uptake foreign vital culture into its abyssal maw and assimilate it into the tempest of late Capitalism to keep mainstream culture juiced. 
• Everywhere sudden dead ends into private property. Paranoid signs and foreboding in the countryside. More on this later.