WORLDS APART

The unrest in Baltimore in late April resulting from the death in police custody of a black man and the prolonged, incessant coverage this incident got in the media has rubbed our noses mercilessly in the inconvenient truth that America has split apart in two worlds that may physically only be a few miles apart, but are existentially in different hemispheres. (For the purpose of this column, I’ll call the occupants of the prosperous world the ‘fortunates’ and their opposites the ‘unfortunates’.)

This separation has not come overnight. Books have been written about it, all sounding an alarm bell. First Charles Murray in his seminal “Coming Apart”, published in 2012. This book identified the class separation within the white population in the USA that has taken place between 1960 and 2010. Then George Packer addressed the problem in his 2013 book “The Unwinding” and just recently Robert Putnam put the spotlight on the problem in his book “Our Kids” which follows the trails of kids growing up in high and low income families in Port Clinton, Ohio in the fifties (when he was growing up there) and then right now. Other than Charles Murray, Robert Putnam looks at both white and non-white families and finds that ethnicity is less of a driver of the separation than income class and the upbringing of children.

All three books make it clear that this separation, the splitting apart of America in two distinctly different constituencies, is a problem not only for the people who have drawn the short straw, but for America as a nation and a civil society. America has become the proverbial house divided within itself, refuting its motto E Pluribus Unum.

It is not the separation itself that should concern us. Look at the history of any of the American big cities and you will find that they consisted of neighborhoods that were largely confined by class and ethnicity determined long ago by waves of immigration and an upper-class escapism from the filth, the dreariness and the crowdedness of big city life before zoning and sanitation. This class based neighborhood forming did not stand in the way of upward mobility for the talented and ambitious children of the less privileged. The real problem is that the two Americas are not only locationally but also normatively split with hardly anything in common and – worst of all – the upward social mobility, that for so long has been the quintessential hallmark of living in America, has virtually vanished.

Putnam’s book makes the case that fifty years ago people of all classes and ethnicities could be counted on to be living by a generally accepted social code that included parental accountability for the behavior of their children, respect for elders and authority, the use of proper language, the selection of appropriate dress, the belief that hard work will be rewarded and the evidence of good personal care. These social codes might have differed between the wealthy and the poor, the white and the non-white, the immigrants and the autochthones, but virtually all people were living by a generally accepted social code. The ones who did not were outcasts, the exceptions who confirmed the rule.

The existence of these social codes facilitated the upward mobility for past generations. They knew and accepted that if you wanted to get ahead in the world you would have to play by the rules and they knew what the basic rules were. That is no longer the case, at least not in the milieu where the unfortunates grow up. The breakdown of the family structure that we have witnessed over the last fifty years is one of the major contributors to the weakening and disappearance of the social code and it has disproportionately hit the unfortunates.

So, here we are. We have one America where the sky is the limit. Children born in stable and loving two parent families with high wealth and income where the social code remains very much alive. And another America with virtually no prospect of wellness and prosperity.  Children born in dysfunctional, poor families and neighborhoods where the power of a solid social code is no longer recognized. In this world, the circumstances of your birth very much determine your prospects to succeed in life.

There is a high degree of unanimity between the right and the left in the media and in political circles that America has in fact split in two along the lines described herein and that this presents a problem for the stability and progress of the nation. But there is no unanimity at all on what to do about it and whether the federal government should take on this challenge.

In my book ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’   I have argued that our public sector is failing us by not adequately addressing the impediments that the unfortunates have to overcome in their quest for upward mobility. Our politicians are failing us by not dealing with problems that disproportionately affect the unfortunates, like access to and affordability of education and healthcare, infrastructure breakdown, drugs, guns, inequities in the criminal justice system and a misguided welfare system. The government cannot legislate morality, attitude or behavior but it can and should create conditions that offer a clearly illuminated path out of poverty and misery for the unfortunates and their children. Unfortunately our current political system is about as dysfunctional as the environment in which the unfortunates live and so the major challenges of our time stay unattended.

We continue to live worlds apart until ……………?