We live in a plutocracy.
More of us are behaving as beasts in order to live.
I encourage you all to read the brief account of Tearyan Brown's life story, which I can't summarize fairly and shouldn't paste whole, here.
To say he had a difficult earlier life would be understating. He spent two years in jail recently, waiting for a trial after a "confused" elderly woman accused him of stealing 9 dollars from her. Even though his friends placed him at a different location. That's right. Two years for nine bucks he didn't take. He wept before his lawyer as he faced the prospect of spending years in prison, (he'd been convicted of a felony two decades prior) unable to see his children who lay on the table in front of him in photograph.
Two years later and not guilty, Brown's lost his old, blue collar job and faces legal troubles from being unable to pay child support. Though the mother of his children defends him in court. No job's in the works that he can use to help him get back on his feet. He survives on less than $250 a month in New Jersey, mainly food stamps. Within 4 months his welfare shall vanish. He knows he'll be dispossessed, and living on the streets. Just relocate to another state, he's told. How simple! And his progeny will become fatherless children as he once was. His once stable life lays wrecked by the criminal justice system which, as Chris Hedges notes, has an inappropriate sense of justice.
But innocence and guilt are funny things in America. If you are rich and guilty, if you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, if you wear fancy suits and have degrees from elite universities that cost more per year than Brown used to make, you get taxpayer money. You get lots of it. You maintain the lavish lifestyle of jets and spas and million-dollar bonuses. You live a life of unchecked greed and have too much in a world where most have too little. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown and African-American and 39 years old with four kids and no job and you live in the inner city, you are in trouble. No one comes to help you. You don’t get a second chance. This is what being poor means.
Hedges mentions other stories, although no where does he include Professor Gates and Martha's Vineyard. *He saves his ink for the poor and the criminal.
Brown says all things are "better with God". But these are mediocre times, and to some extent we're products of our environment:
"There are thousands more guns out there than when I was on the street," Brown says. "It is easier to buy a gun than get liquor from a liquor store."
He says he rarely goes out at night, even to the corner store. It is too dangerous.
The desperation is palpable. People don’t know where to turn. Benefits are running out. More and more people are out of work.
"You see things getting worse and worse," he says. "You see people who wonder how they are going to eat and take care of themselves and their kids. You see people starting to do anything to get food, to hustle or rob, to go back to doing things they do not want to do. Good people start doin’ bad things. People are getting eviler."
American food deserts expand, hurting the poor. More and more at-risk people are ineligible for benefits and welfare. Many don't know how to navigate the state, low-income and other types of health programs.
I find no reason to believe the widespread obliviousness among the elite towards the suffering of many will diminish. Yesterday, Rick Sanchez of CNN interviewed Senator Barasso of Wyoming on health care. He asked if we had the best health care system. Why? What else would a man with gold-standard health insurance on the tax-payer dime say? Why didn't they interview a middle-aged Wyoming man who can't qualify for Medicare? How is Hedges' article going to bolster anyone except those already divided against the plutocrats in our split nation? (How many Americans read at all?) The lack of compassion isn't going away. I don't mean to be cynical, because I think we can find our way out.
Our way out will lie in forcing these sons of bitches to enter the 21st century, kicking and screaming. I don't intend to die as a participant in an economy less fair than that of my grandmother's generation. This year, I met someone who's now charged with defrauding the government of tens of millions of dollars. Thanks to the team of highly-paid lawyers there's been no jail time yet, and the whole affair's apt to end in a light prison sentence. If only it had been 9 dollars from an old lady in Trenton.