Exhaustion is not the same thing as Liberty

The image below this blog's title is of the former site of about 5000 jobs, here in my hometown. That mangled mailbox used to serve one of the factories. The address, to me, says it all. 222 Liberty Avenue, presently that patch of weeds and cracked pavement stretching away between the mud puddles. You'd almost think that something's been lost, here. I took these photos, and stitched them together as best I could, because there's something about Liberty spelled out in still-shiny letters, on a bed of battered rust, that seems iconic to me, for this state; for too much of the country. See, without good jobs, Liberty is just a word on a mailbox, just a shiny memory on a fading ground. It's no mistake that sailors still call their time off-duty "liberty". I expect that anyone who has felt the constraints of lousy jobs clawing at their free time, more and more over the years, knows exactly what I'm talking about. I'll come back to Liberty; maybe until you're sick of it, some other time. I had planned to cover other issues in this first post, but it's late, I have to work in the morning, and we can get to other questions, like the name and purpose of this blog, in future. But I figured I had to get it up and running, even if it had to stagger onto the Net, still half-asleep. Appropriate for a working-class blog, I think. Good Night!