Abuse

We live in a time when simple and appropriate discipline by school teachers leaves them prone to accusations of abuse. Meanwhile, I hear verbal abuse of children all around me. My supermarket aisles are often populated by stressed mothers whose children are spinning on bad nutrition based in sugar and cheap carbohydrate foods. The mothers are commonly obese themselves. Their children run around the store without any consciousness of other shoppers. An inevitable collision with an elderly person or a store clerk leads to a scathing diatribe of loud, unabashed verbal abuse of a child by its parent. Sometimes accompanied by an all-too-common physical assault. 

The conflicting conventions of reproductive autonomy and social political correctness are creating an antisocial underclass. Violence is a growing problem as handguns are proliferating in the communities where this underclass reside. The more violent and antisocial this underclass becomes, the less likely any intervention will be made from outside of it. This is known to anyone who knew the ethnically or racially segregated ghettos of an earlier time in urban America. 

The deterioration of the public education system is a contributing factor. The increase in the imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders in their youth is another. The dismantling of the public mental health system is also a contributing factor. We are now seeing the results of refusing to provide adequate mental health services to poor communities while pouring money into ineffectual police forces and prison systems. 

The greater abuse in the U.S. is the abuse of the working class and the impoverished by their own government, which has shifted its generosity to corporate welfare from human welfare. The gains of post-WWII America in general social equality has been undermined intentionally by the Republicans and New Liberals, who bow to the shrines of Ronald Reagan and corporate capitalism. In reality, Reagan-lovers are proponents of corporate welfare over human welfare. 

Growing poverty and poor education of the greater population will eventually generate tremendous costs to those in the corporate class as well. Detroit's bankruptcy proceedings are a recent example. The racial riots of the 1960s and the L.A. riots of 1992 are examples of the cost to everyone of fostering an underclass. 

Humanism and atheism as movements in the U.S. are currently ivory-tower social trends within the corporate class. This is an unfortunate repeat of history. The lack of integration of socialist ideals by the intelligentsia into public education in an earlier time gave rise to anarchist and communist movements, headed by disgruntled members of the educated middle class who manipulated the impoverished to do their violence. These revolutionary actions usually gave rise to further abuse of the impoverished over time.