From the St. Louis Post Dispatch in 2014, when a female reader chastised me for not having a heart, for not wanting to re-build Ferguson MO after the folks there destroyed their own neighborhood.

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A lady on the St. Louis Post Dispatch asked me where I lost my heart, as we discussed re-building Ferguson through a public donation program, and I expressed my disagreement with this approach. My response:

I guess after 63 years of watching great progress in this once great country get beat down, turned around, and thrown out and ignored, that is where I lost my heart. I guess I lost it when the Mil. Indus. Complex overran American govt leaders and all common sense, to build a defense budget greater than some countries. I lost it when we shot JFK because he wanted peace and was taking great strides in his own way to get us there. His speech at American Un. in 1963 was one of the best Ted Sorenson ever wrote for him. Gone. All that hope for world peace, gone, and instead, American people settle for more war memorials. I lost it when I was told to go sit in a foxhole with the instructions not to shoot back if shot at, then called a baby killer upon arriving home. I lost it when the Dulles faction in govt. and his own Joint Chiefs of Staff betrayed him, along with Averill Harrimann. I lost it when our Supreme Court gave in to Big Business and allowed unlimited campaign contributions, and offshore accounts to avoid taxes, and supported tax loopholes and any attempts to fix and eliminate them, and ruled in several recent school integration cases with decisions that have set back all progress since 1954. I lost it when our president chose the auto and bank industries to bail out, to the aversion of all others, at my expense, and yours. GM now is healthier than ever, merrily building and selling in China and making gross amounts of profit, none of which is spent in the U.S. Not a single banker has gone to jail, or even been charged, for the home loan fraud 7 years ago perpretrated knowlingly upon the country. Tax dodges in the Cayman Islands with the full knowledge and support of Congress, so ineffective it can't even reach across the aisle to talk to one another. I lost it when Congress refused to fund Education to the states, who in turn refuse to fund their districts, yet find it not a big problem, to offer retail incentives to Wal Mart and Sears and others, and tax incentives; and to subsidize farmers who are making records profits anyway. The Farm Bill this year was $956B, for a FDR dinosaur of a program that Congress has admitted publicly they do not know how to fix. I lost it when we let our inner cities crumble and ignored our fellow citizens who still live and work and play there, trying to make good lives from lousy tenements, worse schools, and unsafe paths to and from both. I lost it when only about a third of eligible voters bothered to do so in mid-terms, and the fact that we haven't had 60% participation in a presidential election since 1968. We sure like our reality t.v. programs and our cell phones, though. I lost it when one preident started a war costing billons of dollars and thousands of live from all concerned, in a futile search for wmd. I lost it when a president attacked a Middle East country that wasn't bothering us. I lost it when our war in Afghanistan reached the 14 year mark, with a minimum two more years to go. I lost it when I read our govt has spent $7.6B to fight the Afghanistan opium crop, yet it produced record levels in 2013, which are expected to be surpassed this year. I lost it when our president authorized $6B to go to Africa to fight Ebola, from our empty treasury. I lost it when I realized we still live in under a nuclear cloud on the tip of a mountain of debt, ready to fall into national bankrupticy and international disgrace. This, is when I lost it. How about you?