Their job, he asserted, was to keep despised minorities, including the homeless and jobless, out of sight and out of the way.

That's still the case today, just as it was in 1968 when I was 18 years old and working for a tree company in my suburban hometown outside New York City.

The police station was on the main drag in the heart of downtown. My great-uncle Tom (my mother's father's brother-in-law) had been a policeman in town during Prohibition and in 1968 was the security guard at the granite bank that sat at one end of the street. At the other end of the block, maybe a quarter of a mile away, was a little candy store owned by a Holocaust survivor with a faded number tattooed on his arm. He opened early and sold newspapers and cigarettes to the blue collar workers who walked around the corner to the diner where they ate breakfast and lunch.