What Threatens America - Channels for Addressing Grievances

I want to devote some thought to how we address grievances here in America.  I wanted to start, first, with the follow up to some of the issues I've posted about before.  In Flint, Michigan a couple of lawsuits are in progress as we speak, the Governor has issues a public apology and vowed to drink the water himself.  It's still an ongoing topic, not something I would say is done by any means, but things are being done to address the grievance. 

In Ferguson, Missouri even though the specific officer involved was not indicted the federal Dept of Justice investigated the police department and determined that it had engaged in misconduct against the citizens of Ferguson.  Again, this is still an ongoing issue...and there are people who think not enough was done (and others who think too much was done).  I'm not trying to judge how it was addressed, so much as pointing out that various groups are trying to address it.

So it sounds good, right?  We have grievances, they're being addressed, nothing to worry about?

Except that these specific instances are also examples of deeper underlying grievances.  Racial differences.  Class tension.  Elitism.  Leadership that fails to address a problem before it blows up into a full-blown crisis.  (This last one is not the best point, since who knows how many situations were addressed before they became a crisis?)

Note that I said "racial differences" instead of "racism".  That's because the different opinions about incidents like this reflect different cultures as well as actual racism.  "Law-abiding" primarily white citizens who support and respect law enforcement (and I count myself and most everyone I know in this category) have a hard time understanding why people - people who used to get arrested for loitering and other minor offenses in order to force them to work on various projects; who saw law enforcement bring out dogs and hoses against men, women and children - don't trust the police.  Are some of these incidents truly about criminal behavior?  Or is some of it because an officer doesn't feel they are given the respect due as a representative of the law?

Yet I actually want to focus more on class grievances - in part because that is what Trump appears to be tapping into.  I've seen article after article over the last decade that has talked about the shrinking of the middle class.  Stagnant wages.  Greater disparity in income.  We know this is happening.  You have to be living under a rock to be unaware of this...

And yet nothing serious is being done.  During the Great Depression we had the Public Works Administration, during the Great Recession we had austerity.  We have respected economists saying we actually should have had even more stimulus, we have article after article talking about our aging infrastructure...and none of it seems to translate into actual policy changes. 

I read economic articles talking about 'recovery', how the companies who were bailed out during the financial crisis were able to pay everything back, how things are better...yet none of it seems to trickle down to the average person.  Getting by is just as much of a struggle now than it was 8 years ago.  (and then we get articles saying "we need consumer spending to grow the economy", and I have to laugh.  Where do you think the consumers get the money to spend?  They're tapped out...they're going to keep being tapped out until debts are paid off or wages grow.)

I can get into nitty gritty details more at a later time, I kind of wanted to point out a few other things first.

A few years ago a study showed that the collective preferences of ordinary citizens has almost no effect on policy, whereas the collective preferences of our wealthiest citizens have a much greater impact. 

In other words - the wealthy don't seem to care about the struggles of the everyone else, and they're the ones who actually make policy. 

This is a pretty massive and difficult topic, so I'll probably post some more later.

Science Fiction, Frontiers and Second Sons

I love reading science fiction, and much of the genre deals with 'frontier' issues.  That is, people moving out into uninhabited planets.  In science fiction, often for reasons people came to the US: Opportunity, religious freedom, etc.

I know I've heard, peripherally, some discussion of what it meant when we were a frontier society.  And how that has changed as we expanded to the limit, and the frontiers closed.  A frontier was a place where people could have opportunities unavailable back home.  In our own history, that's part of what the second sons of Europe did...the ones who were never going to inherit (what with the law of primogeniture and all that.  It's different in societies, like Afghanistan, where the sons are expected to split the inheritance entirely.  Causes problems all its own, as the land they inherit keeps getting smaller.)

Anyways.  I wonder, sometimes, if the class wars of today are related to that.  Talented people don't have as many opportunities, because they have to advance within an already established system.  One where they start out disadvantaged to begin with.

The American dream is tied to that notion - the idea that hard work and talent can get you somewhere, regardless of who you were back in the Old World.

I don't think the closing of the frontier, in and of itself, means that the dream is dead.  But...

Well, it's kind of like a discussion I had with someone in Afghanistan about water usage.  Water is pretty scarce over there, and some of the so-called 'squatters' were basically the disadvantaged (i.e. people with little access to the crucial water necessary for farming) finding creative ways to succeed.  Creative, and perhaps not quite legal, of course.  Anyways.  I was talking with a hydrologist, working with USAID, and he insisted that there really was enough water to go around.  It's just that the Afghans had to cooperate and work together to portion it out appropriately.  The people up river couldn't be planting crops that required a lot of water, since it didn't leave as much for those downstream.  Management was important - and practically impossible in a society with little reason to cooperate. 

They had a history of zero-sum games w/regards to water, and the ones who 'won' and had access had no reason to limit themselves for the sake of the losers who didn't.

To bring this back to America, and class warfare - the winners of our system see no reason to limit themselves for the sake of everyone else.  (And, with the set of beliefs allowing them to feel like they earned and deserve their status, they feel unfairly put upon when others argue they should.) 

Yet, at the end of the day, there are still a LOT of disadvantaged people who just don't have the opportunities that used to be available. 

It's hard to address the problem when the winners aren't even willing to admit that there IS a problem.