What makes Michigan special to me is that Michigan is in me. You never realize who you are until you live in someone else's culture long enough to find the tension of who you were raised to be, conflicting with the adopted culture. For me, what I most missed when I lived abroad was the honesty, concern for my fellow citizen, and the practical can do spirit of the family of Michiganians. We don't realize how good it is to have governmental officials that want to help you, who are honest and we don't need to bribe. We don't realize how good it is to go to a store or mechanic and know that they are not trying to cheat us. I am not naive, as I know that there are bad characters in any society. But every where I go, I hear peoples disgusted over dishonesty in leadership, media, business or the church. That collective desire for truthfulness is something precious.

I have lived in and traveled to some of the most beautiful places in the world. But wherever I have lived, I have come to miss Michigan's four seasons, beautiful hardwood forests, gentle farmland, varied coastlines, clear lakes and rivers. And yet, for all the natural beauty, we also have access to varied cultural venues to fit every taste.

What troubles me for our future is the increasing divisiveness of our politicians (and their lack of experience) and a dismissal of the value of civil service and good government. We are also not facing our biggest challenge. Making Detroit a functioning, modern city. There are those who seem to be making a tremendous effort at reviving the city, but the State and the Federal government need to intervene to address corruption in city government. Either we address the problems of Detroit or we refocus our state economy on a different geographic area such as Ann Arbor, East Lansing and Grand Rapids.

We also need to face the huge problem of urban sprawl. Environmentally, sprawl is probably the most devastating problem we have. CO2 emissions are increased, while forest, shoreline and farmland are destroyed and resources wasted. We need to develop vertically and not horizontally. If cities are well run and safe, people flock to them. Additionally, Michigan's zoning laws foster the maximum destruction of land by discouraging densely populated developments in rural areas. Living in Europe I saw a different pattern of development. Towns and villages were densely populated while the intervening open spaces were kept intact. That is the ideal way to develop. We can foster that type of development if we understand what is causing our sprawl and find alternate ways to meet the needs and wants of our citizens.

Michigan is a great place to live and work. The crisis we now face can either be an opportunity to look at ourselves and chart a new course, or we can blindly wreck those things that are good and hold us together.