"i have never resisted change, even when it has been called progress, and yet i felt resentment toward the strangers swamping what i thought of as my country with noise and clutter and the inevitable rings of junk.  and of course these new people will resent the newer people.  i remember how when i was a child we responded to the natural dislike of the stranger.  we who were born here and our parents also felt a strange superiority over newcomers, barbarians, forestieri, and they, the foreigners, resented us and even made a rude poem about us:

the miner came in forty-nine

the whores in fifty-one.

and when they got together,

they made a native son.

and we were an outrage to the spanish-mexicans and they their turn on the indians.  could that be why the sequoias make folks nervous?  those natives were grown trees when a political execution took place on golgotha.  they were well toward middle age when caesar destroyed the roman republic in the process of saving it.  to the sequoias everyone is a stranger, a barbarian."

John Steinbeck

"Travels with Charley in Search of America"