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Comment by UIUC_06 | Hacker News Reader

> Among them, there is evidence that Laura often exhibited a quick temper.

> Laura hated wearing sunbonnets and yearned keenly for beautiful, stylish dresses.

Oh no! What a monster! Cancel her NOW.

> Neither Charles and Caroline Ingalls, nor Almanzo and Laura Wilder, could manage to make the promise of free land come true. Never did they ever make a living wage solely from farming.

Even worse! She sold lots of innocent little girls a dream they could never have. The criminal.

Farming is a dream. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn't. I'd rather have a population of dreamers than a population of soulless drones.

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It seems like you’re mischaracterizing the tone of this essay.

I just read it as a thoughtfully developed history of a familiar subject, published in a regional lifestyle magazine, but you seem to be responding to it as if its some moralizing Twitter screed.

Did I miss something?

The twitter-screed is the social-media equivalent of the amp-hour. This power is generated, transmitted and consumed. It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.

>It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.

Thank you for today’s most quotable metaphor!

Maybe you missed the cancel-LHOTP movement, e.g. someone else on the thread posted this:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house...

a heading is "To Live the Impossible Dream." Do we find any sympathetic treatment of Laura in this article? Or is it purely debunking?

So you posted a low quality, snarky reply to a completely different article?

No, I posted a high-quality reply to the subtext of THIS article. It was pure debunking for a political end and didn't deserve a lengthy, objective answer.

I think your definition of 'high-quality' differs from the community norm.

'high-quality' means aligns with my worldview, right?

I think you mean "my opinion" not "community norm" there.

This article strongly recommends two books be read together for those who want deep and multi-dimensional insight into the history of Wilder and LHOP, and surfaces some details from each while grounding it in personal experience, for a casual audience of middle class Montanans.

Readers, it would seem, are expected to come out of it having something fresh and interesting to talk about on their hike or over Sunday dinner.

If there’s something political in your experience of it, that would seem to be through subjective associations of your own, not a subtext.

An aside about the dream of farming. I'd always heard it subtly implied that my maternal grandfather, born 1899, and early on, a farmer in Minnesota, was not much of a farmer, because, ultimately, after 30 years or so of farming, he gave up and moved to California, and took a job in town.

What I did not realize, and subsequently caused me to regard his farming skills with greater generosity, was that during the first fifty years of his life, the percentage of people working on farms went from 20% of the US population to 2%! So, even if one were a good farmer, there was still a very real chance of getting squeezed out.

Yeah, farming is hard, plus it demands luck.

I'd never succeed at it, although nowadays, I'd hire a farm manager. That guy might keep it afloat, but then I wouldn't make any money off it because I'd be paying him.

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