Politics & Power Quote by Robert Benton

America sells motion as virtue, and Benton is quietly pointing at what that bargain costs. His phrasing is almost reportorial - “rarely,” “close proximity,” “throughout their lives” - but the emotional punch is in the accumulation. By the time he lands on the image of elderly parents not being cared for by their children, the reader has already been walked through a national pattern that feels less like choice and more like design.

As a filmmaker who’s spent decades watching families fracture and re-form on screen, Benton’s intent isn’t to romanticize some old-country ideal of multigenerational duty. It’s to underline how mobility, the supposed engine of American self-making, also functions as a solvent. Careers pull people away, housing markets scatter them, and the culture treats leaving as a rite of passage. “Staying” starts to look like failure, or at least like a lack of ambition. The subtext is that independence has a body count, just not the dramatic kind: loneliness, logistical abandonment, the outsourcing of care to institutions because the family has been geographically reorganized out of the picture.

Context matters, too. Benton comes from a generation that watched postwar prosperity supercharge suburbanization, interstate travel, and a labor market built on relocation. His observation reads like a camera lingering on the background of the American success story: the empty guest room, the long-distance phone call, the parent whose needs become a project instead of a presence. It works because it refuses melodrama; it indicts a system by describing its “normal.”