Cool.

So I'd just like to read this paragraph.

I think it'll give people a sense of why it, it, it mattered to me.

So I titled this "Whither America?" "Seeing John Sayles' film City of Hope brought to mind an excursion my father and I had made, uh, that we had made a few years earlier along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, not far from where I had grown up.

He was eager to show me the radical changes underway And indeed, replacing the old and deteriorating docks and warehouses, working-class housing were snazzy high-rise buildings, townhouse developments, and shopping centers, as if a Riviera on the Hudson were being created.

Of course, my father well knew the drive would bring out the socialist commentary in me, and I obliged with remarks about capitalism, Reaganomics, and the rich getting richer.

He listened, not unappreciatively, but when I finished, he observed how, quote, "A lot of money was being made by the banks, the developers," and he said with the emphasis added no doubt to fend off my predictable class analysis, "By the unions, too." I had no intention of fighting him.

Mm-hmm