I believe that Chester County’s Drug Courts have been very
successful in helping the mostly young white people that go through the system
get out of addiction and back to the land of the living. But there is a never
ending influx of new young people to replace those that graduated in the drug
court system.
At the top 1% we are creating a permanent superwealthy
class. Most of the 1% has businesses whose product is money that makes more
money. At the same time our great middle class that built our roads, railroads and great manufacturing industries is falling into what could be a
permanent underclass.
Young white people see their slightly older friends that
went into debt to get college degree so they can work as a temp in a dead end
job. So why bother with college. Many times they look for answers with drugs.
The only difference in drug use between more affluent all
white communities in Chester and Montgomery Counties and in mostly black
communities is the type of drugs used, the frequency of use and frequency of addiction
is the same.
Things like Governor Corbett’s war on education will surely
create more unemployed white drug addicts. The economy is turning around but we
are still locked into a service economy where making money in an electronic “cloud”
is the product. We don’t make usable stuff anymore. Our auto industry came
back, but they are mostly assembly factories. Apple is supposed to be an
American success story but the iPhone is made in China by slave labor.
In the 1960s we were almost assured that we would make a
better life for ourselves than our parents did. The American Dream that we all believed
in is stagnant. Income inequality is
probably the primary reason for it’s morbidity. But as Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York
Times income inequality may not be only reason the American Dream has gone
away.
There are no answers to the problem here. But the first step
in solving a problem is admitting that there is a problem.
“Persistent poverty is America’s great moral challenge, but it’s
far more than that.
As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health
care costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a chunk
of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically, “underclass” has
often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but increasingly it includes
elements of the white working class as well.”
FROM
February 8, 2012
The
White Underclass
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
No comments:
Post a Comment
You can add your voice to this blog by posting a comment.