America faces an increasingly competitive world, and it seems increasingly clear that innovation and creativity will be the deciding factors in that competition. We will need to solve problems we are only beginning to grasp and reinvent our way of life to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Fortunately, in our best schools and universities, we are preparing young people to craft those solutions.
Unfortunately, about twenty percent of Americans seem not to be just left behind, but forgotten altogether, mired in inter-generational poverty, in places abandoned by industry and with weakened local governments straining to meet basic needs that the market cannot or will not provide. This, along with the related disorder in our health care system, explains why the United States slipped another three places last year to fifteenth place in the Human Development Index, which measures a broad range of factors including health, education and income.
This is not merely a moral or humanitarian concern. Hemmed in by Drug War and its attendant pathologies, shoved into schools unable to cope with children too burdened by nightmarish home lives to learn, these forgotten Americans represent a colossal drag on our economy and our national potential. We saw unmistakably how corrosive the systematic exclusion of the poor could be when Hurricane Katrina blew away the patina of civilization and exposed gangs of white New Orleanians patrolling their neighborhoods with guns, challenging and all too often shooting African-Americans fleeing the devastation in the lower Ninth Ward. A society in which the bottom twenty percent are on their own is one which we have to be afraid of each other, in which we need guns and alarm systems, in which we need to plant GPS devices in our children.
The reason why the aftermath of Katrina was so devastating for the GOP is that it highlighted the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Conservative agenda. After thirty years of domination of the national debate, Conservatives, with gutless Centrist Democrats as allies, had succeeded in almost all of their objectives. They had privatized much of the functions of government, handing the remnants to talentless cronies in utter contempt of the very idea of public service. They had gotten their free-trade bills and tax credits to outsourcers that had sped the flight of jobs from America. They had fought against all forms of publicly-funded family planning. They had gutted aid to the poor and housing assistance. They had capitalized politically on our distrust of one another and had helped fuel the worst fears and resentments. They had succeeded in “getting tough on crime,” turning America’s cities into war zones as drug gangs subsidized by failed policy occupied our streets and cramming our prisons with 2.3 million of our fellow citizens, most for minor offenses. Most of all, they had encouraged middle-class Americans to think that the poor were not their problem, that there was something wrong with them, that poverty was a choice.
The results were sprawled on our TV screens for all to see. So much attention was paid to the political effects of the aftermath, of the inept relief efforts, but the truly revealing things about Katrina were what happened before the storm hit, the society that Conservatism made. One storm was enough to convince Americans they didn’t want to live in that world. We are coming to the realization that we will pay now or pay later. We can cheaply educate and insure our citizens now, or expensively incarcerate and treat them in emergency rooms later. We can provide mixed-income housing now, or deal with concentrated pockets of misery and crime later. The longer we ignore the problems we face, the more the price tag goes up. These are our neighbors. There are no walls high enough to escape the consequences of their misery.
We’re not the only nation facing these problems, and far from the worst. But we seem unable to think clearly about the problems of mass poverty and exclusion and the threat that rising income inequalities pose to the cohesion of our society. This is not India or China with majority peasant populations. We have the resources and the mature political system to deal with these problems. What we lack is the will to address them seriously. So, as the long-term fiscal crisis this country faces becomes the greatest issue in political life, we must remember that we will pay now or we will pay later.
