Wondering here in Allentown
Business this week has brought me to the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area of Pennsylvania, and of course, I have Billy Joel stuck in my head. And it's getting very hard to staaaaaaaaayy ...

In my quick tour of the area, I have to question why anybody did stay. It's a shell of a city. The local section of Thursday's newspaper was essentially a six-page crime report. The downtown Bethlehem area has some very cool architecture, but it morphs quickly into a depressing neighborhood of dilapidated row houses, places whose occupants would apparently rather mill around outside than inside. A city government official in Easton made news earlier this week by calling a newspaper reporter a "stupid bitch" in the middle of a public hearing. (To his credit, he did resign the next day.) Some of the surrounding area is very pretty, but it doesn't take long to wind up in another depressing little town where nothing has happened since 1940. And normally, I like small towns.

In a word: Yuk.

The last thing you see before the little regional jet lands at the Lehigh Valley International Airport is a big hole where a strip-mining operation kept families fed for the first half of the 20th century. The hole's still there, and there's nothing anybody can get out of it and nothing anybody can do about it. It said to me, "Well, we got ours; you go find a way to get yours."

It's a shame. Small cities in the United States should be centers of innovation and ideas and creativity. Industry and the trades should provide a living wage (Everybody had a pretty good shot/To get at least as far as their old man got). I understand how capitalism works, but I think we're starting to see some of the long-term effects of capitalism on humans. I hope I'm not right about that.