I wonder, almost every day, what people are for?

The people who can’t afford to live in their apartments anymore?

The people tossed out on the streets when the stock market drops.

Or people who drive carriage horses or train elephants or give pony rides to children?

Or workers with pride and families to feed, and their security?

Or farmers who are doomed as inefficient, who can’t even set their own price for milk,  and are being driven off of their land by corporate farms?

Or children shot down in their schools because the people who protect them have forgotten what leaders are for.

Or young soldiers sent off to war after war by angry old men who don’t know what young people are for?

Or factory workers whose jobs vanish overseas, cut loose by bloodless corporations who can’t afford to worry about what people are for?

Or pharmacists forced to close because economists and bureaucrats have forgotten what people are for.

For me, it is not a left-or-right thing, it is a basic human dignity thing, I can’t imagine why anyone on the left-or-the-right wouldn’t care what people are for. We are all people, any one of these people could be us, our mothers, our fathers, our brothers or sisters.

Yet there are few places I ever go where they seem to remember what people are for.

Brattleboro, Vt., is one of those places. So, I think, is my little town of Cambridge, N.Y. I love to go to Brattleboro, I stop at Sam’s to buy a pair of jeans and a chambray shirt, my clothes shopping for the year – $82 this year. I always see people on the street in Brattleboro, eating their ice cream or drinking their coffee.

There is always a good photo to be had of people in Brattleboro, they all love to have their photos taken.

Sidewalks are for people there. The streets are lined with small businesses, used bookstores, cafes, vintage clothing stories, mystery bookshops, bead stores, Thai restaurants, Korean restaurants, stone sellers and psychics, a big old pharmacy,  hip consignment stores, an old restored movie theater and hotel. The box stories have not yet gobbled up the small business on the main drag.

So there are people everywhere on the streets in Brattleboro, they smile and say hello and wave, they have not forgotten what people are for in Brattleboro.