Topix Underground

Everyone's dead. I'm going to be the last person with the name my grandfather made-up to dodge draft in Italy...wow. That's sad. I should like sponsor a road sign or a park bench by the river.

It came and went in 100 years. That is and was the epic story of the rise and fall of Detroit and the US auto industry. Hordes of European immigrants that came to work for Henry Ford, exploded and dispersed. I'm proud to have been part of that. Now I'm gentrified and I spit on these dirtballs sneaking under the fence. It's disgusting...a personal insult.

When it was all European it was so so magnificent. The way the houses smelled, the way the people talked. Everyone had their own neighborhoods but we all got along. Even with the blacks it wasn't that bad, not like to today.  That's all gone. It disappeared in the past 40 -50 years. But when I was in high school, every single person I associated with had either parents or grandparents right off the boat and that 100% normal, universal and treated with great respect. Fck. We were so much more polite and respectful than today.

And the order of the day: Building cars and building the things that were needed to build cars...not much more.

Being the youngest of the youngest in successive genrations put me in a weird position that my one grandfather was born in the 1800's maybe 23 years after the Civil War ended and I'm on the edge of being too young to be a 'Boomer'. But I was a child with that wave of European immigrants that came here for that purpose. We would have giant parties on Christmas Eve. All the old people would be speeaking a foreign language.

 There is nothing that compares to that now. Nothing comes close to that spirit, that ethos, that kind of Americanism. They came here with nothing with the promise of nothing. There is no one since that can come close to doing what they did for this country during that period of time - from like 1900 to 1970. The country went from dirt roads to walking on The Moon.....OUR people did that.