Linkmeister

Detroit

Most readers know Mitch Albom as the author of two widely-successful books, Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Some of us remember him as a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press.

He still lives in Detroit, and he's written a tribute to that beleaguered city in the current issue of Sports Illustrated. I saw it in the print edition, and it's now appearing online. An excerpt:

We want to scream, but we don't scream, because this is not a screaming place, this is a swallow-hard-and-deal-with-it place. So workers rise in darkness and rev their engines against the winter cold and drive to the plant and punch in and spend hours doing the work that America doesn't want to do any more, the kind that makes something real and hard to the touch. Manufacturing. Remember manufacturing? They do that here. And then they punch out and drive home (three o'clock is rush hour in these parts, the end of a shift) and wash up and touch the kids under the chin and sit down for dinner and flip on the news.

And then they really want to scream.

Because what they see -- what all Detroit sees -- is a nation that appears ready to flick us away like lint. We see senators voting our death sentence. We see bankers clucking their tongues at our business model (as if we invented the credit default swap!). We see Californians knock our cars for ruining the environment (as if their endless driving has nothing to do with it). We see sports announcers call our football team "ridiculous." Heck, during the Lions' annual Thanksgiving game, CBS's Shannon Sharpe actually wore a bag over his head.

It hurts us. We may not show it, but it does.

Read the whole thing. It might make you a little sad. It might make you a little angry. What I guarantee it will do is touch you.