Reply #10: I grew up in a GM town, lived there for 47 1/2 years before moving to another city 100

[mrcheerful]

miles away. In my youth, I remember traffic jams near all the factories and plants, down town was nothing but store after store busy with customers until closing time. Sundays the down town area had so much traffic that it took you an hour to drive the one mile through town. The city went from having 3 foundries and 4 or 5 auto parts plants in 1970 to 1 foundry and 2 auto plants today. Drive through the city today on a sunday and you get the ideal of how an A bomb would have effected the city back in the good old days. A car or 2 might pass by you on that one mile stretch, boarded up store fronts with broken windows on the upper floors. Hookers walking every inch of that 1 mile strip, hookers that used to charge 50 dollars for a Bill C are now doing it for $5, $20 for the works. Cop cars drive past the hookers and wave. There was a time when a cop car would have sent them running. Neighborhoods that used to be filled with playing kids now have young thugs giving every car the evil eye as it goes by. Abandoned house's 6 per block 3 to 4 of them burned out shells. This is not the america of my youth and it really rips my heart out to think this is what we have left to our children.