I’m still digesting the psychological fallout from my trip today to the abandoned Detroit Book Depository – formerly the Roosevelt Warehouse, formerly the Detroit Post Office. I’m going to write more and post many more pictures . . . but I just had to share this one tonight:

It’s a photograph of the Michigan Central Station, taken from the third floor of the Depository.

I took it surrounded by the ash of a thousand textbooks within a building that once educated a generation of children who (like their parents) went to bed at night afraid of death in a nuclear firestorm. Its decaying half-flooded skeleton rests in the shadow of a building constructed by industrial giants to orchestrate the Randian motion of trains across a continent. That building is now a gutted ruin that hulks likes a shadowy harbinger over the slow rot of the infrastructure that once made a collection of people into a Nation.

It’s easy to get drunk on nostalgia. It’s also easy to become paralyzed with hopelessness. Looking at past greatness turned to ruin is a wonderful way to get seduced down either of those roads.

Fight it.

This need not be the end.

We are the same people who built the Central Station. We are the same people who saw a hundred thousand children supplied with textbooks from the Depository.

We can do yet greater things.