In 1989, when the Wall fell, the distant halves of Germany reunited, and we declared victory in a war against the Soviet Union that had been unofficially declared in 1946, I imagined our world would shortly change. I had always admired the sparkling, affluent suburbs as a child in the 1970s; politicians had told us we couldn’t have better lives in our cities, because it was so crucial to devote the national budget to massive military spending — to fund the wars in Vietnam and dozens of other places, to create space-age weapons and their equally fantastic delivery systems, including the ships and planes of the Navy and Air Force. When the US declared victory in this history-ending war to end war, I expected that at least some government spending would be redirected inward. To rebuild the underfunded public schools I had attended; to pay and reward good teachers and self-sacrificing doctors; to create neighborhood recreation centers; to fund after-school programs and athletics, neighborhood hospitals and parks; to provide treatment centers and clinics for the visibly ill people crowding the streets; to resurface our roads and build effective transportation systems; to provide a banking system that offered affordable loans, so that when I turned 16 the small businesses in my neighborhood could be run by people who lived in my neighborhood, who would hire me after school or in the summer; to make the technology available so that the radio station I liked could stay on the air after dark; and, yes, to pay the person we used to call “Officer Friendly” in the ’70s to walk his leisurely patrol around the neighborhood, acting like he cared about the people who lived there.

But none of this happened, you all. In fact, the opposite happened. After a brief and very minor drop in the 1990s, people for the next complete generation argued that military spending should be not just what it had been, but even greater, and that our lives in the cities should be even less like the lives of people in the suburbs. They argued that war was now endless, in fact — a part of the human condition. We should have a war on drugs, one that would push the incarcerated population past 2 million. We should no longer build schools in the cities but prisons, detention centers for “wilding” juveniles, and hire as many police as possible on the shoestring budgets of local governments. All the amenities that I had dreamed of, that I connected to the American way of life, were to be the unregulated province of private companies.