You Can't Go Home Again.

(Apologies to Thomas Wolfe). I spent last week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my birthplace, visiting family. I left Massachusetts in 1967 when I joined the Air Force and have been all over the world since then and call Texas home now, only going back to Cambridge for a visit now and then. A lot has changed back home in forty two years.

One doesn't walk the streets or use public transportation after dark anymore. Apparently the underprivileged are roaming the streets soliciting volunteers to redistribute their wealth.

The Archdiocese of Boston has sold off a lot of churches, schools and property to pay the legal judgements won by victims of pedophile priests. Among the properties gone are our local parish church and elementary school. My mother, my sister and I all attended that school. My mother has attended that church all her life. The seminary where I spent my first two years of college is now a veterinary hospital. The Seminary where I got my bachelor's degree was recently sold to Boston College for expansion space. Some of my seminary classmates are convicted pedophiles. I guess I won't be attending any class reunions. I'm probably lucky I escaped with my virtue intact.

The Boston Globe was running an investigative journalism piece last week. They had discovered the frightening details about the miltary giving "scary-looking black rifles" to various Police Departments in Massachusetts. POLICE HAVE ASSAULT WEAPONS! I came away with the impression that the reporter felt that any time the police had a disagreement with a citizen (or a non-citizen guest of the USA) they should consult a third party arbitrator to resolve their differences in a mutually acceptable conclusion. Meanwhile, the police should lead the parade of everyone turning in their guns to be melted down and cast into pretty sculptures.

Some things haven't changed in Massachusetts. It's still one of the most expensive places to live in the US. Taxes are high. Politicians are corrupt at all levels. It's very democratic - every second auto has an obama bumper sticker on it. (Or maybe that's because the state doesn't issue handicapped license plates.)

Wait, they did change one thing: the Charles River. When I was a kid, if you fell in, the only treatment was euthanasia. They have actually stopped all the upstream factory and municipal runoff into the river to the point that the substance that flows between Cambridge and Boston is true chemical water.