The five- or six-thousand-square-foot pocket park at the corner of Rhode Island and 18th Streets on Buffalo’s far West Side isn’t really uninviting, but it has an appearance of unfinished desuetude. Nine or 10 medium-height maples, a couple of nondescript paved surfaces, and a couple of empty wood-beam-bordered plant beds interrupt its grassy surfaces.

Ralph Nader is at the pulpit of Buffalo’s Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, appealing to the consciences of the people filling the church’s pews. “What are people going to tell their grandkids?” he asks. When they want to know what their grandparents were doing when momentous events were convulsing American society, as they are now, he continues, “Will you say ‘I’m really sorry, I guess I was busy doing stuff like updating my Facebook profile’?”