I don't see an American Insurgency as something happening within five or probably even within ten years, but I think that the building blocks for that catastrophic outcome are being put into place by a political system that is out of control.
What are the building blocks of insurgency after all? Well, one is huge income disparities. And boy have we got that in spades. Any country with a few Haves and a lot of Have Nots is asking for trouble eventually.
Another area that is a breeding ground for violent dissent is when people feel that the system not only doesn't represent them, but that they cannot possibly get that representation peacefully. Remember the bailout? Did YOUR representative listen and act when they were overwhelmed with input telling them not to do it? Or did they just ignore the general population and do it anyway? Can we get a real dialog going in the health care debate? Can we get past the corporate controlled media and their handling the issues?
The final piece of the insurgency puzzle, and one that I hope never gets put into place, is when people have nothing left to lose. That's when things start spiraling out of control. A relatively peaceful situation can explode into chaos overnight.
I'm worried a bit. The greed machine that is Wall Street and big corporate America will never wrap their heads around this one on their own and our elected officials have certainly never shown any grasp of long term consequences. And this is just the sort of problem that requires attention far in advance of the first symptoms. If we wait until this problem becomes apparent, it will already be too late.
With our present economic system and the direction it has been taking for the last thirty years, the middle class will continue to erode whether this recession ends or not. The basic flaws in the system are still there and show no signs of going away. (For example, the laws that allowed Enron to play the system are still there.) No one is repealing the newer bankruptcy laws, the credit card industry laws or even auditing the extremely wealthy. They're still untouchable.
Enough nibbles at the middle class and it will break. Should that day ever come, insurgency will eventually follow. Desperate people do desperate things.
We need to imagine this scenario as a possibility, if a distant one at the present, to understand the importance of reform for everyone, not just the middle class. The rich will not benefit any more from such an outcome than the rest of us will. It's hard to make money when society breaks down. Here's hoping we can steer clear of this.