From Conflict to Crisis

The Danger of U.S. Actions

A society that is reared on competition will face unsettling challenges to authority if it doesn’t set certain functions outside the arena of battle, via systematic enrichment of the affluent minority that has always had the power to topple and ruin the system.

Today’s preoccupation with America’s revolutionary history is not just a piece of theater. At the heart of America’s outrage is an inability to lash out and demand redemption from the source of its distress because the pain is inflicted, not by hatred, but by the fundamental lack of stability built into our way of life.

Now that a fifth of the population is suffering job loss, foreclosures, or exclusion from employment due to prejudice, poor credit, a lack of skills or education, a glut of competition and insufficient opportunity, the failure to provide for the helpless majority means the system is at an impasse. Because the system can’t—or won’—perform, the Tea Party’s rise was preemptivec—with all its implied violence and “real” American theater—as the means to channel our anger into voting out Obama so reform can proceed unimpeded…with all its inherent dangers.

Turning from foreign examples that erupted in the environments of colonialism and post-colonialism, neoliberalism, militarism and oligarchies, to a review of the head-spinning social and political noise that stands in for responsible debate in America today, Ms. Haskin’s richly documented essay sees a bonfire prepared as social tensions are increased and inter-group pressures are encouraged to mount. So much for “One nation…”