[Martina]

I think it's important for people to remember the past, but not so they are grateful or even inspired. The fact is that the past contains possibilities that seem closed off to us now.

Republicans prior to Reagan weren't, for the most part, rabid deregulators. So many things we feel are almost impossible goals now were accepted from the end of the war through the seventies. I wish people knew that.

I don't care if today's activists appreciate what previous folk did, even the terrible loss of life. I would just like it if they had a sense of the world before Reagan when corporate greed had not corrupted most aspects of life. People label as socialist policies that Nixon supported.

We are lying to kids about their future prospects. We don't have the jobs anymore to support most people as middle class workers unless we really tax the rich, create a high minimum wage, and do unprecedented things to make housing affordable. That looks like, and is, socislist. Before we exported jobs and gutted viable businesses to sell them for parts, before our economy was based on finance and services for the rich, it was possible to be a working person and own a house. You could send your kids to college, take vacations, afford health care. We won't be going back to that without also returning to pre-Reagan tax rates. We will never go back to that without changes that seem extremely radical to most Americans. But no Republican of even the Reagan era could have foreseen how fast and deep the decline of the working and middle classes would be.