How sweet was the moment when, the catheter removed, I was able to again
urinate on my own. I heard myself whispering enthusiastically, with no
hint of disrespect or irony, "Thank you, Jesus!"
Outside Paradise, government will never be perfect. But that's no reason to give up
on it—any more than the fact that we can't love our children perfectly entails giving up on loving them as well as we can.
Sooner or later, and usually sooner, conversations about passenger trains and Amtrak in particular sputter with the dirty "s-word": subsidies. But all American means of transportation depend on "subsidies."
