Years ago, I did a TV show in Toledo where I contrasted the tourist attractions of Michigan with those of Ohio. I had on the tourism directors for both states — and it wasn’t much of a contest. Michigan had the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Pictured Rocks; Motown and Greenfield Village; great fishing, hunting, the Tahquamenon Falls, and on and on.
Ohio had Cedar Point, some islands in Lake Erie, and a whole lot more presidential gravesites than we did. Okay, so maybe that’s being a little unfair to Ohio.
But not much. Michigan is a far more beautiful state than most, and for many years, we were also the happening place for growth and technology. Detroit and Los Angeles were the fastest growing cities in this country when the automobile age exploded.
Later, thanks to prosperity and the unions, this state pioneered bringing working people into the middle class. When I was growing up in Detroit in the 1950s and 60s, this was a state that had excellent services and good public schools. Not everything was perfect. People smoked far more than they do now. Cars weren’t as safe. Sexism and racism were far worse.
But we believed in ourselves and our future as a people and a state, and people wanted their kids to have better lives than they had. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the case today.
Some of that is our leaders’ fault. Governors as far back as Soapy Williams warned we needed to diversify our economy, and that the world that provided high-paying automotive jobs for unskilled labor wouldn’t last forever. But nobody did much about it.
Eventually, thanks to foreign competition and automation, the roof fell in. The last time I checked, General Motors had more blue-collar workers in Flint alone in 1979 than it does today in the entire country. The results have been devastating for Michigan.
But what’s been even worse is that our government has been hijacked by right-wing fanatics who have let our infrastructure fall apart. Nearly a century ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said “taxes are the price we pay for civilized society.” He was a conservative Republican, but he got it. Today’s right wing has forgotten that.
Studies have shown that we are paying far more for car repairs every year than we’d have to pay in taxes if they just “fixed the damn roads.” But our lawmakers have refused to do it right.
Our roads and bridges and sewer systems are wearing out. We are the only major city in the country that has no mass transit of any kind from the airport to downtown. With infrastructure that poor, there’s no way we can ever hope to attract a major firm like Amazon.
Instead, businesses and new savvy college graduates are finding themselves forced to leave Michigan. This is how to build a future. Everybody knows you have to invest to start a business. We need to invest in our infrastructure and our schools if we have any hope of avoiding becoming a totally backward and hopeless economy.
When people ask me how they should vote, I tell them the answer is simple: Vote only for candidates who tell you that your children are more important than you are.
(Editor’s Note: This commentary was first broadcast on Superstation 910 AM)
