Where Have We Gone Wrong?

I generally don't like to be a downer, but with the recent rash of school shootings popping up again, the many rhetorical questions abound:

"How could someone do something like this?"
"How could no one have seen the signs that this person was troubled?"
"What's wrong with society?"

There will never be sufficient answers to those first two questions, but I think the third question is one that's worth examining. What, in fact, is wrong with our society?

Charles Carl Roberts IV... married, father of three. Sounds like the ideal life, no? Why, then, would this man barricade himself into a one-room school, tie up 10 young girls, and then kill five of them and himself (while wounding the other five fairly critically) at the first sign of law enforcement?

Why?

Roberts left behind evidence that offered a small glimpse into his mind:

Roberts apparently remembered molesting two relatives 20 years ago and dreamed about molesting again. Police raised the possibility that Roberts, who brought lubricating jelly with him, may have been planning to sexually assault the Amish girls. Roberts, 32, left separate notes for his wife and each of his three children, who are all 6 years or younger, at their home in Bart, [State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B.] Miller said.

In the notes, Roberts also said he was haunted by the death of his prematurely born daughter in 1997. The baby, Elise, died 20 minutes after being delivered, Miller said.

Elise's death "changed my life forever," the milk truck driver wrote to his wife. "I haven't been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness it seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us and I go right back to anger."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/04/amish.shooting.ap/index.html

So, why didn't anyone get this man some help? Why didn't he talk to someone about this "hate" and "unimaginable emptiness" before it boiled over?

Who knows?

But, for me, this shines a light on a much bigger problem: our society has given up on helping those in need of help. I will endeavor to keep this from being a political rant, but the mantra of the country has switched from helping those in need to expecting that those in need will just pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.

Between our education problems, health care problems, and public assistance problems, people in need have fewer and fewer resources with which to "pull themselves up" anymore. But, before we idict society as a bunch of uncaring selfish jark-offs, let's examine a little deeper.

Lou Dobbs (a man I usually don't particularly care for) has this to say:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit an all-time high and Wall Street firms are posting some of their best earnings ever. For the first time in our nation's history, the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans includes only billionaires. In fact, having only a billion dollars means you're not on the list. As a group, the Forbes 400 has a collective net worth of $1.25 trillion.

So the rich are doing well. But how about the middle class?

More Americans than ever are living in poverty, living without health care, paying more for housing and for the costs of our public education. And real wages are falling.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/03/Dobbs.Oct4/index.html

Pull yourselves up by the bootstraps indeed.

So, rather than being a completely uncaring lot, it would almost seem that the majority of this country has been forced so much to cover their own collective ass to stay afloat that taking care of those who are in need has been forced to the back burner.

So, in other words, I don't think ALL of society has stopped caring as much as I think that the majority of society no longer has the means with which to care effectively.



Dobbs continues:

The number of Americans without health coverage rose by 1.3 million last year, up to 46.6 million, according to the Census Bureau. What's worse, more than one in 10 American children are now uninsured. Fewer employers than ever are providing health care to their employees and those who are still lucky enough to receive employer-provided coverage are paying a much larger share: The Kaiser family foundation says the cost of family health insurance, in fact, is up 87 percent since 2000.

The costs of higher education are also hurting middle-class families like never before. In this increasingly credentialed society, the total cost of tuition, fees, room and board at four-year public colleges and universities has ballooned 44 percent over the past four years. And the proportion of family income it takes to pay for college is growing for families everywhere. The biggest jump, according to the National Center for Higher Education, is in Ohio, where college costs now take 42 percent of the average family budget, up from 28 percent in the early 1990s.

Our dependency on foreign oil is also hamstringing working men and women. Gasoline prices are back on the decline (for now), but many Americans this summer were shelling out double what they used to pay to drive their cars. And gas prices now, while lower than at their peak in August, are still about 60 percent higher than in January 2001.

...

So what has been keeping our middle class afloat in the face of rapidly rising costs? American families have been living on, as well as in, their homes. More than one-third of homeowners are spending more than 30 percent of their income on the cost of housing, a level that pushes the edge of affordability. Nationwide median home values from 2000-2005 jumped 32 percent, and homeowners have been pulling equity out of their houses in order to keep up with escalating tuition bills, health care costs and energy costs.

Costs of everything are on the rise. Wages are not. People are staying afloat by basically "rebuying" their houses (using the equity they have) and putting themselves into debt further and further into the future simply to meet the needs of today. We can all say, "why didn't that guy get himself some help or some therapy?" but we're not truly able or willing to provide him with that assistance, because hey, we all have problems and there just isn't enough money to go around anymore.

Or is there? All of this isn't to say that there aren't people out there with the means to help who are not doing so.

The government used to play a large role in helping people to take care of these basic needs, but we've siphoned so much money out of the federal budget to pay for a pointless war and irresponsible tax cuts (so that each member of the Forbes 400 now cracks the "billionare" plateau--hooray!!) that the safety net that used to be there is either gone or much, much smaller.

Two Proverbs

The conservative mantra about welfare has always been to say that if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. But, if you teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime.

and

A man much wiser than I once said to a group of us at a political meeting for educators that, we have so many problems in this country, but if we just fixed the problem of education first, the rest would inevitably take care of themselves.


What does all of this mean? The two statements are fundamentally the same, but smack of the problem: the snotty conservative proverb is great on paper, but if none of those heartless jackals are willing to FUND any sort of education for poor people, they won't ever learn to help themselves. And this is where we've gone wrong.

We have two classes of people: those that don't care to help, and those that don't have the means to help. No one likes paying taxes, but they are a necessary evil, if you will, in this country in order to keep the country afloat. I would gladly give my meager tax cut back to the government to invest into education and health care if it meant that every American member of that Forbes 400 list of billionares had to give their GIGANTIC tax cuts back for the same reason. And, really, put your mind to work and imagine what the $300 BILLION spent on invading Iraq could do for not only education and health care, but in our crusade-like quest to feel safer here at home.

Dobbs finishes:

Perhaps one of our nation's leading business magazines would like to create something called a Forbes or Fortune 250 Million list, which would reveal the dire financial pressures that our public policies have produced for working men and women and their families. It's time for all of us to focus on that deep chasm we have allowed to open between the wealthiest Americans and the middle class and those who aspire to it.

Otherwise, there will be 250 million casualties in what has become nothing less than class warfare.

Indeed, Lou.

This isn't even *just* an American issue. Another man much wiser than I once told President Bush that, before we can truly combat terrorism, we need to "drain the lakes of poverty on which the mosquitos of terrorism breed." Eloquently put, and perfectly true.

Unfortunately, and sadly unrealistically, that would mean that the rich elite that run this country would have to shed their greed and be willing to part with some of their own resources. For every Warren Buffet, there are tens of Jeffrey Skillings, Andrew Fastows, Bernard Ebbers, and Dennis Kozlowskis who are willing to bilk the American public of their lives' savings and livelihoods in the name a of few more millions for themselves.

It would seem that, until we examine the policies of this country, America is doomed to continue asking "why" for a long, long time.