Friday, June 23, 2006
Our Problem, Not Yours
The USofA seems to have something seriously flawed in the way we deal with society's issues. The question is what is it? Ever since World War 2 we've been trying to impose our way of life on other countries pretty much unsuccessfully. Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Beirut, Sudan, Iran and others have all ended up pretty much as military disasters.
This isn't to say that our way of life is without flaws. We've got a bunch of them and they seem to be getting worse. The war on drugs has been and still is a fiasco. From Prohibition of the Roaring 20s to the Meth and oxycodin plague of today, it doesn't seem like we've made much of a dent in the problem. Here in this area, a lot of kids would rather deal drugs and die young that try and crawl out of the depths of poverty. The USofA has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies and jail populations which I'm sure are related in some insidious way. We have one of the highest rates of executions of any country - right up there with China, Iran and Saudi Arabia - what a neighborhood that is.
Our rich are in fact getting richer, which is nice if you're one of them. Unfortunately, our poor are also getting poorer and growing in quantity. It has somehow become acceptable for a company to layoff a thousand workers, report record losses, and yet still find the ways and means to give the CEO a bonus and huge retirement package.
We pride ourselves on personal freedoms yet the government tracks our calls, our finances, our reading habits, and still manages to give away personal information on people by the millions. We've grown so inured to loss of life, that the time we notice the 2 or 3 GIs getting blown up in the Middle East is when we know one of them. The people over there that we are supposedly helping just cut off the head of two of our guys. Our pursuit of personal freedom has resulted in this country having one of the largest, if not the largest, prison populations in the world. I think there's some outrageous statistic that says one out of five black men in this country is in jail.
Maybe we should quit trying to impose our way of life on other countries until we straighten ourselves out. We need to educate instead of incarcerate. We need to get people to crave a good book and not crave a good toke. We need to have our country offer a way of living to kids that is more desirable than a short life on the street pushing meth. What we need is to have a higher college population and a smaller jail population. And there is no problem with having a super-rich segment of population if there isn't a super poor population to balance them out.
Once we can fix our problems, then we can try fixing others.
