America needs an industrial plan

America needs an industrial plan

Recently, I drove from my father’s birthplace in Biddeford, Maine, to my mother’s birthplace in Petersburg, Virginia. Two different towns. Two different states. Two different regions. And yet, oddly, different ends of the same sad street. Factories were never just factories. They gave whole towns their rhythm. Most Americans now live at the same address: “We live where there used to be a factory. And when it shut down, what shot up was joblessne…