Quote:
Originally Posted by randolph
During the great depression (1930s), thousands of people were out of work and additional thousands of poor farmers lost their farms in the midwest dust storms. It was a terrible time for a lot of people. Social services were practically nonexistent. Yet, there was little violence, people suffered starved and died without help. They didn't burn down their neighborhoods, they looked for work.
The urban youth in the big cities that have grown up disenfranchised from the working society seem become sociopathic and lash out, setting fires and looting. They have no feeling of responsibility to a society that ignores them.
Do the social services that we have today have something to do with the urban youth problem or is it simply the lack of opportunity to make a living as part of the society?
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Disenfranchisement (or more accurately, alienation) from "working society" is a powerful motivator for all manner of terrible behavior. Just as the value of a human life may diminish to near zero to the urban youth who experiences gang murder all around him as he grows up, so too do those who are marginalized in society, and who feel little opportunity for success, develop a sense of no responsibility to that society. It is not an excuse ... just a fact.
Unfortunately, and despite what ila has written above (see our earlier exchange in this thread), it is not a simple matter of working hard to pull one's self out of poverty. The reason we have the so-called "working poor" is because of the structural problem of a society that is based on labor exploitation. If someone can work hard all his life and never get out of poverty, is it the person's fault alone? I think not.