This is what you get!!

I recall the first time I went to the USA.  On business.  I stayed at the Ritz in New York.  And every time I walked out the door, a few paces, I would be accosted all the way down the street by people trying to sell me drugs, consorts, and pan handlers.  The touts were rampant.  And frightening. It would have been fall 1987.  It seemed to me at that time that the city’s crime rate, which was very high, could never be turned around.  Tourists were turning away in droves. 

And of course it was.  Turned around.  I visited the city a hundred times over the next several decades, and observed its transformation.  The touts disappeared; new buildings were erected; the parks cleaned up; and it once again felt safe to walk down the street.  Into the parks, the churches, just walk and walk.  Or run on occasion. On one occasion, there was a street person with all his worldly goods beside him, and as I passed, his mobile phone rang.  And he answered it.  How bad could it be?

Yet still my current view of the USA, is a country at war with itself.  We have all read of the 46 million on food stamps.  The shockingly difficult unemployment figures.  And recently I read that new job creation has a ratio of 1 in ten being a permanent job, and the rest temps or contract.  The average wage is $25,000, and the wealth of the average middle class American has declined by 41 % in the last five years (versus an increase in the top quartile, and mainly because their wealth is held in their home which have declined in value).

Yet as I have written here, one of the few industries with huge growth over the last four years is guns:  “98% increase in Ruger quarterly firearm sales since 3Q08 from $117m to $232m”. 

Another blog dealt with the crash and grab of the legislature as it throws up and sometimes passes the most extraordinary legislation. 

But I am going to again bang on about the out of control law(less?) enforcement being used to target its citizens by the USA.  I just don’t get why more people are not commenting on this in the international press.   The country is simply heaving with cities or suburbs in lockdown with an occupation style mentality, and people all armed. Syria, huh!!

Hotel rooms and TV;  watched a documentary the other night about the city of Philadelphia, in north eastern USA.  It reputedly (at the time of the show) had the highest murder / gun crime rate in the USA.  The show, Louis Theraux:  Law and Disorder in Philadelphia.

The cops were all doing their best in Philli.  The put-upon African Americans who were being constantly harassed by them, also got a little heated about what they believed was racial profiling.  And I have to admit, on several occasions, that’s what it looked like to me.  But African Americans represent 43.4% of the population there, and whites 41%.  So I am not sure that claim can be substantiated.

But a young articulate African American speaking to camera summed up one incident between the police and a group of his friends this way: “This is what you get in America right now”.  Couldn’t have put it better myself.