Eleven percent of U.S. households now lack enough food for a healthy, active life and more than 3.5 million children under the age of five are at risk of hunger. With poverty and unemployment on the rise and falling food bank stocks, food insecurity is increasingly threatening the well being of millions of Americans, and the risk of food riots in the United States is growing.
The rest of the world is already experiencing public disorder resulting from the worldwide recession, as protests and riots have erupted during the last year. Economically-related riots took place in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast and Senegal, and other violence occurred in Greece, China, Latvia, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Russia. Massive protests were held in Paris, Rome, Moscow and Dublin.
Some like to blame the entire collapse of the U.S. economy on illegal immigration, and hate crimes against Latinos and Hispanics have increased by 40 percent since 2003. The number of organized hate groups has grown by 54 percent since 2000 to as many as 926 in just the last year. These groups provide a focus for the rage and frustration experienced by those, increasingly of the former middle class, who have lost their jobs and dreams of the good life.
With the election of an African American president during an economic crisis attributed by many to illegal immigration, the Internet provides hate groups with a forum to spew the same kind of flammable propaganda that fueled the Holocaust. Web sites maintained by these groups are attracting hundreds of thousands of registered users who find common cause for their racial hatred and violent fantasies.
The other side of racism is the anger felt by African Americans and Latinos, who suffer unemployment rates double that of whites, are twice or three times as likely to be uninsured, and who are being foreclosed out of their dream homes, evicted from their apartments, and thrown into the street.
The risk of violent insurrection in the United States is multiplied by all of these factors, but expands geometrically when the ready availability of firearms is factored into the equation. The militia movement that raged throughout the Clinton administration and lay dormant during the Bush II years is again being called to arms by a host of right-wing agitators. The response is frightening to imagine.
We need look no further than our border with Mexico to see the consequence of poverty, organized crime, and firearms played out in violent reality. Criminal drug gangs killed more than 7,000 people last year in Mexico, and had virtually taken over several border cities until the military and federal police were brought in to regain control. Supplied from the United States, where gun control statutes are lax, Mexican gangs are armed with military weaponry not available to police officers, such as .50 caliber rifles that easily penetrate bulletproof vests. Of the thousands of traceable weapons seized in Mexico last year, 90 percent originated in the U.S.
The fact that a thousand Americans are murdered with firearms every month is only part of the tragic story. More than 30,000 die each year, including 17,000 suicides and 800 accidents. Seventy thousand Americans survive being shot each year, including 48,000 crime victims, 4,200 attempted suicides, and 15,000 accidents. Three thousand of these U.S. gun deaths are children, constituting 86 percent of all children under the age of 15 killed by firearms worldwide.
Police officers kill 300 and wound more than 1,000 people each year, many of whom are armed with guns. Even though 38 police officers were murdered with firearms in 2008 and 15 have already died this year, the National Rifle Association continues to promote the right of individuals to own assault rifles and to use ammunition that can penetrate the protective vests of police officers.
Police officers suffered the highest homicide rate in the 1930's during the Great Depression. Overall, National Institute of Justice researchers found that "the harder the economic times and the greater the economic uncertainty, the higher the murder rates were for both police officers and the general public." (Kaminski and Marvell)
To fight its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our military has trained hundreds of thousands of our sons and daughters to kill other humans in contravention of every quality and emotion instilled in them by a lawful and peaceful society, and thousands of them have tragically followed orders to do so. The military acknowledges that at least one in five of these soldiers suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome causing them to "relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged, and these symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly impair the person’s daily life." Hundreds of these soldiers have returned home to commit crimes of violence that cannot be otherwise explained than as a result of the carnage they witnessed and participated in.
Although veterans are guaranteed five years of "medical" care after discharge, the government argued in a lawsuit last year that the statutory right does not include mental health care. The federal judge ruled that while the Veterans Administration "might not be meeting all of the needs of the nation’s veterans" he was powerless to do anything about it. All of us will have to live with the consequences of the violence we have engendered in this generation of warriors for decades to come.
There’s no shortage of bad news. These were just the headlines.
Less Freedom
Benjamin Franklin said, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." However, we have already seen, following 9-11, that Americans passively accepted the draconian provisions of the PATRIOT Act, wholesale eavesdropping of domestic communications, preventive detention without trials, and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Just how far are we prepared to go as racial and economic rage boils to the surface and crime rates explode?
The United States already has the highest incarceration rate, greater than any other nation. Today, almost 25 percent of all prisoners in the world are confined in our jails and prisons. Thirteen and a half million adults pass through more than 5,000 jails and prisons in the U.S. each year, 60 percent of whom are racial or ethnic minorities. The mentally ill in America are four times more likely to be found in prison than in a mental health hospital.
