Why Are There So Many Murders in this Country?

 

Recently (3-26-2023), the entire Opinion section of the Inquirer consisted of a list of over five-hundred names of people who were murdered in Philadelphia last year. There have also been articles of interviews with family members of those who were murdered. In my opinion, those articles failed to express the unimaginable horror those family members felt and feel because people they loved and cared for were senselessly gunned down.

Today there are several candidates running for Mayor representing the Democratic and Republican Parties. These candidates have essentially two proposals for dealing with this persistent and horrendous problem. One is to place more restrictions on the sale of guns, especially the automatic AR-15 rifle. The other proposal is to increase funding to the police. In my opinion, both these proposals would fail to begin to resolve the problem of mass murders in this city. Why do I feel this way?

Back in the 1990s, I was working in a union organized factory in Philadelphia. One day I read an article in the Daily News about the weekly income of a drug dealer in the city. At that time, I noticed that the income of a drug dealer was slightly more than my income as a union organized factory worker. 

That factory where I worked at is now closed, and my job, as well as the jobs of about 2,500 of my co-workers was eliminated. Today in Philadelphia we see the abandoned remnants of that factory as well as perhaps hundreds of other abandoned factories in the city. However, the corner of Kensington and Allegheny is currently a drug dealing center for the entire east coast.

So, here we see how the elimination of perhaps millions of factory jobs was directly related to the skyrocketing number of deaths due to drug overdoses. This vast increase in drug addiction is also related to the fact that the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Yet both democratic and republican party government officials have prided themselves in the ludicrous idea that the economy is doing “great.” 

During the entire history of the United States, there has always been large numbers of people who lived in abject poverty. During this history, there has always been a gross disparity of wealth. Currently there are about 34 million people who do not have enough food to eat, while there are also about 34 million people who have over $1.2 million in assets. There are five people in this country who own over $100 billion in assets.

Along with this gross disparity of wealth, we have seen massive cutbacks in both education and health care. Literally hundreds of hospitals have closed. Per student funding for public education in Philadelphia is half of what it is on the other side of City Line Avenue in the Lower Merion School District. Yet there have been cutbacks in the Philadelphia school system.

Clearly there are people who have committed senseless murders who do not live in poverty. However, the gross disparity of wealth has created an atmosphere where feelings alienation affect us all to one extent or another. So, how do we deal with this persistent, but largely ignored problem?

We need to put in place a political economic system that gives everyone an ironclad constitutional lifetime right to everything we need. This would include the right to a job, food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to the arts, as well as recreation. Many will argue that this is an impossible dream. However, history is filled with people who had seemingly impossible dreams that became realities. What we need is the will to make it happen.