Yesterday, in Midtown Manhattan, I realized too clearly what's wrong in America right now, and what could be more right....

This is the HUGE Midtown storefront from Diesel...

There was more, another or other windows, more corporate "Be Stupid" encouragements.

In my C-SPAN Book TV After Words interview, John Hope Bryant quoted his mentor, Quincy Jones, saying that America has spent the past couple decades "dumbing down", making "stupid" cool... So here it is. Gosh, is global warming understandable with "be stupid", or getting past racism and class discrimination?, is job creation achieved with "be stupid" ? I'm just not sure.

So John Hope Bryant said we need to spend the next decades making "smart" the next cool. Dr. King would agree, I think. I do. My heroes now are people like Bill Strickland, Dr. Harvest Collier, at Missouri S&T Jeff Rickey at Earlham, Jim Donathan at Elon, Sidney Bridges at Brooklyn Friends School, because they aren't allowing things to dumb down. Something about Quakers, too. Quaker places.

We can't dumb down. It's a crisis.

And this.... !

The Peninsula Hotel. A grand fancy expensive luxury delux hotel. Fifth Avenue. I locked my bike up on the scaffolding in front of the hotel and went in yesterday, to see if one of my sons was there. His part time job. The hotel keeps many workers on part time so they don't have to offer medical and other benefits. But that's a story for another time...

Yesterday, walking in, the doorman stopped me and asked if I was delivering something - I was wearing my bike helmet, my pant legs rolled up, my windbreaker....

"No," I answered.

"Are you delivering a message to a guest? The delivery entrance is around the block."

He was much younger than me, well dressed in his doorman uniform, African-American.

I assured him I wasn't delivering anything, just trying to say hello to my son.

On the way out, I went up and shook his hand. "It must be a hard job, for you, treating someone like a second class citizen," I said, smiling.

"It's just the rules," he said.

"I know. I don't mean you. But why do you think people here are afraid to see someone working? Why does someone working have to go hide in an invisible entrance?"

And I realized. We don't make much in this country anymore. We don't make automobiles competitively. We don't make garments. We don't make electronics. We don't make much furniture, or sheet rock, or steel.

You'd think, maybe, if we INSISTED people who WORK, dressed in their work clothes, HAD to walk through the front door of luxury hotels, were CELEBRATED, if we were NOT ashamed and embarrassed by anyone really WORKING, maybe we'd be a heck of a lot better off?

Maybe?

I'm simplifying things. I'm naive. Romantic.

"You biked here, sir, to deliver a message to someone? Come in, can I help you?"

Shame on us. For glorifying stupid, for insulting work. Just a day in New York.

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