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Gardening is not something I enjoy. Having just returned from the back yard helping my wife in the garden which she loves, I recalled a time when I considered gardening a patriotic duty and did it willingly. I was only a child, but I did my part for the war effort by working in our "victory garden." I helped defeat the Axis powers by tending our tomatores, carrots and radishes. Even kids were expected to contribute to the great cause and we did so willingly. After the war, with my father and other veterans in civilian life again, we all helped to put in place a period of prosperity in which all shared. We made good schools better, we built highways systems, we created social systems that worked for everyone. As a young adult, I felt part of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty. I remember more than 30 years of hope and optimism as we Americans built a better life together. We knew we could do it and we did. But no longer!

Paul Krugman reminds us how today we are going in the other direction and losing our country. We have created a nation which seems to be a mirror opposite of the one I inhabited in my youth. Examples abound: the income and wealth gap between those who work and those who live on investments or inheritance has widened to an immense gulf.

As Krugman points out, the American middle class didn't happen by accident. It was put in place by design and by a people who really believed they were in it together and wanted a just society in which all could share. Taxation, incentives, risk sharing have all been reversed. This can all be turned around, of course, but only by a people who have the will to do it. Are we still that people?