1) I have spent my entire life reading a lot of different points of view and talking to a lot of different kinds of people. I have made it my business to try to understand where people are coming from.

2) So, although I think they are misguided and mistaken, I understand why there are people who think that cities like Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, and Erie are doomed, shouldn't be helped by national public policy, and that the people who can should just move away.

3) What I can't understand, for the life of me, is why they think that any of the people living in these cities, who have a dog in the fight, would take them seriously and embrace their misguided, fatalistic, and destructive ideas about these places.

4) When we say these places have no future, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds apathy, cynicism, and despair.

These cities don't need hospice care. They don't need euthanasia. They need healing.

These places that gave so much to this nation deserve its help.

5) I don't know whether this is the best prescription from a policy standpoint. It's probably not. First attempts rarely are.

But it's most certainly a step in the right direction, and may help get us closer to where we need to be. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/22/marshall-plan-middle-america-eight-mayors/

6) Before the right actions can be identified, one must first summon up the desire and the will to act at all.

If all this proposal ultimately does is to create that desire, it will be enough, for now.

7) I would describe my politics as:

"Pluralistic social conservative, anti-Marxist economic liberal"

I believe that the social fabric and continuity of these places is important and I believe that government has an important role to play in helping them.

This is why I care.