So very many things we wish would come back. The only negatives drive-ins faced was having to search for a working
speaker, and providing heat during the winter months (LOL)
In the small towns of Texas, one still might find a vacant
building once deemed a theater, but seldom in the same category of downtown Dallas’ art deco styles. Those even sported cry rooms for moms to take their crying child, avoiding glares from other patrons. And time marches on.
Sure, time marches on from a drive-in theater's poor speakers to cold cars in winter. But we've nevertheless lost something from that time...
Here's what Emerson had to say:
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.
A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.
His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
From Essay on Self-Reliance