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Sir, Your editorial “America wakes to the din of inequity” (October 17) we believe is essentially correct. For the many, the American dream has become a nightmare. As you point out, “the consequence has been growing inequality, rising poverty and sacrifice by those least able to bear it”.
We believe that there is a direct correlation between this deteriorating situation and the threat of serious social disorder. The National Institutes of Health has reported that economic insecurity generates deep feelings of stress, anger, and low self-worth among affected individuals, families and neighbourhoods. It is clear that poverty, drilled down into neighbourhoods and families for long periods of time, leads to violence – not only the direct violence of crime and suicide, but the structural violence that stunts individual lives, fractures communal bonds, and turns the state into an armed occupier of poor communities. (As we know, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, particularly of people of colour.)
For several decades, protests over poverty and unequal treatment were limited to representatives of the most impoverished and marginalised communities. But the spread and intensification of deprivation, coupled with the impotent posturing of the political establishment, is rapidly changing that. One symptom of growing discontent is the Occupy Wall Street protest and its many spin-offs across America. Although dramatic, these protests have not been joined in so far by the most seriously afflicted victims of urban and rural poverty. It seems increasingly likely that this will happen, however, as a consequence of a crisis brought on, as your editorial says, by “financial excess and political cynicism”. The crisis may thus have the unexpected effect of unifying aggrieved groups across long-established lines of race, region and ethnicity.
Edward Palmer, Distinguished Senior Fellow,
and Richard E. Rubenstein, University Professor,
School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Arlington, VA, US
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