Improvement?

     Americans seem possessed by an irresistible urge to improve everything: to streamline all scenarios: to make its world faster, wider, more convenient, ever-more productive.  It greatly admires engineering & technology, that tirelessly tilt at the windmills of time & space.
       But along comes the poet: that marginal, raffish soul with the silly question, "what's wrong with the world as it is?  Why make a straight race out of every curve & feature, in love with expedience, why take all the personality out of the landscape so that where you arrive (so quickly) looks no different from the one you departed? Why compress time to the point it chases you?"  And then he adds the familiar question posed by poets down the ages: "in this haste to manufacture ever-greater wealth for ourselves, have we glossed & trampled a less tangible and less measurable wealth, an indulgence of sunlight & morning breezes, of bird-frolic and the easy laughter of friends?