Monday, May 23, 2011

1500 Trailer Leader

It's funny how stereotypes develop a life of their own. How they persist through the generations and get perpetuated by the media. Take trailers. Or Mobile Homes. Or Manufactured Housing. Perfectly fine places to live. Peopled by perfectly ordinary people.
But stereotypes tell us trailers should be inhabited by gap-toothed miscreants suffering from three generations of inbreeding. As if no mobile home park has ever been built within commuting distance of a dental clinic.
Or a family counseling center.
Mobile homes are not the Great Plains answer to Appalachia. Mobile homes were simply built to save costs and be transportable to different locations, there to be set up on perfectly good foundations and while away their days in cozy comfort.
Folks who chose to live in mobile home parks were actually the first practitioners of the credo of urban density. Cutting down their carbon footprint, whether they knew it or not, by living closer together on smaller lots, and saving on concrete and excavating costs to boot.
Trailers were leaders.
So it was with amazement that I read the following statistic in a national magazine the other day. It said, "About half of all people killed by tornadoes live in mobile homes (don't they mean lived in mobile homes?) which are ripped apart and sucked into the air because of their flimsy construction."
Oh please, like site-built homes can't be flimsy? And look at how they skewed the statistical emphasis. If half of the people killed in tornadoes lived in mobile homes, where did the other half live? Um...foundation homes?
You see how they cheated on the statistic? That's like saying 50% of all divorces are caused by women. And the other 50%?
The truth is, when a tornado hits 'em, just about all homes are mobile.
America, ya gotta love it.

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