When I moved to Costa Rica in 2001, I was hugely relieved to live in a country where people liked other people. They were poor, but they were friendly.
Americans do not realize how unfriendly they have become. And they are not interested in knowing how unfriendly they have become.
I could end this posting right there - and maybe I should end it right there. But I want to push it a little further. How did this strange situation develop?
Here I can refer to my hometown of Ft. Madison, Iowa. A living laboratory of how things went wrong. And I can start with the Fifties, when Ft. Madison was a thriving Industrial town, with the Santa Fe Railroad on the West End of town - and the Sheaffer Pen Company on the East End town.
It is now part of the Rust Belt of America, where nothing is going on. Because no one wants to live there. Why doesn't anyone want to live there? Because there are no jobs there, and no new jobs in sight.
Didn't anyone see this coming? No, they just got out, as my family did, in 1947 - when we moved across the river to Nauvoo, Illinois. My mother's hometown, a beautiful fruit-growing area.
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