Good afternoon, everyone. My deepest thanks to the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Affairs, and to its dean, Greg Mantsios, and to Paula Finn, who came down with the flu, and so she couldn’t be here, the editor of New Labor Forum — which, by the way, is a wonderful publication, that, as Greg mentioned, I’ve been affiliated with since its inception — for organizing this event. Thanks, as well, to the Newmark School of Journalism and the Sidney Hillman Foundation for agreeing to co-sponsor; to Henry Garrido for that terrific introduction and who I’ve known, obviously, for many years; and to Alexandra Lescaze of the Hillman Foundation for agreeing to moderate the discussion that follows.
As many of you have heard, I’ll be leaving the New York area in just a few days, on Tuesday, abandoning the city I have called home for most of my life, where I grew up, the place where I was shaped professionally and politically, and will instead be relocating to Chicago, the hometown of my wife, who’s taken the new job as a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
At my age — and I just turned 75 a few weeks ago — that’s called a major change. It’s also the age when some of us start to try and make sense of things, to ascertain in the few years left to us whether we’ve managed to achieve some greater purpose and meaning to our lives beyond just progress for ourselves and our loved ones, or whether we’ve drifted
— source democracynow.org | Dec 23, 2022