I’m concerned. Really concerned. We are creating two classes in this country of ours–the struggling middle class, plus those more affluent, and then a desperate underclass whose inhabitants have no way of being successfully integrated into our society. And we’re not talking about a small number of people.
Consider the following facts. Around 30-40% of students, depending upon how you count them, drop out of high school. And far too many who graduate from high school cannot read. ( I don’t mean “read well”–I mean “read.”) Unwed mothers now account for 40% of births in our country. One out of every five children is born into poverty–and that would be the Federal poverty level, which is actually far below what a family can actually live on.
What happens to people who grow up in a highly technological society, and who fail to gain even the basic skills and knowledge expected of a high school graduate? They go to prison, that’s what. One out of every 100 of our citizens is incarcerated–the highest percentage, as we say, in the civilized world. And our prison systems have become a big business, totally draining the tax coffers of resources that could be used elsewhere–perhaps in preventative services and in education, so that more people could stay out of prison.
The fact is that our prison systems have become so expensive to maintain that we’re having to let prisoners out early–there’s no more room for them, and no more money to build more prisons. A study done in 2005 of the California prison system, one of the most overcrowded in the nation, revealed that one inmate per week was dying because the state failed to provide adequate health care–for example, failed to treat an out-of-control infection. Our prison systems all over this nation are overcrowded and rehabilitation is practically non-existent. So what the state is doing, of course, is simply turning petty criminals into hardened and habitual criminals.
What is the answer to this dilemma of the two Americas? I hardly think the answer is to continue tax cuts for the rich, while the poor languish in poverty and hopelessness. Do we really think we can keep these desperate and alienated citizens “over there”? Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”–no, we will be visited by our neglect, many times over.
I don’t know what it will take to wake up this country. Our soldiers in Iraq traverse the landscape in fear–every object might contain an IED. We should know that this country is filling up with human IED’s–that is, people who have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no dreams left to dream. When they explode, no one will be safe.
