Something(s) Is Going Wrong

Earlier this week a friend of several decades sent me a book review on the subject of guns, gun laws, mayhem in the US, etc. The reviewer took issue with Trump's comment made while visiting Japan that "nothing can be done to stop mass shootings". Trump's remark followed the recent church massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The reviewer went on to compare gun deaths in Japan that "rarely exceed 10 per year while we hover around 30,000." He finishes the thought with, "Clearly Japan has figured something out that we have not . . . or that we don't want to."

Among other notions in my reply was, "Japan rigorously enforces its homogeneous culture, e.g. no muslims or mosques permitted, while America is a melting pot of humans from every country on the planet, a condition that may result in culture clashes." My friend, politely interpreting that notion as "an original and interesting take on an American social problem", seemed to demur in his reply, perhaps challenging me to prove my thesis. While deliberating my answer to that challenge I received an email from an investment service to which I subscribe expressing concern about the current state of affairs in this country and asking for readers' thoughts about US social structure. There is a connection, however loose, between my friend's attempt to school me on gun control and the notion that something(s) is wrong here. I replied to the request as follows. In a list of societies ranging from homogeneous (ethnically pure being highest) to heterogeneous (everybody is different) Japan is always situated on top. In the "new world", Canada is more diverse (heterogeneous) than the US which is somewhere in the middle of the list. The US is less homogeneous than many countries and trending more toward heterogeneity due to immigration, legal and otherwise. I submit this is a valid concern, specifically when it is combined with other important criteria.

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"Political correctness" and "walking on eggs" are apt descriptions of today's social behavior

The social structure of a society is generally reflected in defined areas like ethnicity, customs, education, and religion. Emanating from those disciplines are the systems that maintain a society, for good or bad. Those would include laws, regulations, and politics. All of the foregoing combine to create an economy that well serves the populace . . . or not. The media, including traditional print and the multitude of newer technological systems regularly employed by many of us, report every piece of data no matter how insignificant it may be to the masses or important to infinitely minuscule slices of society. Social media has created numerous sects (for want of a better description) of people eying a slice of the American pie and it makes coherence extremely difficult for many. It could even be described as multiple culture clashes. Social media has no allegiance to flag or anthem . . . it adjusts to the notions, however inane or bizarre, of those who mystically can achieve a broad following. It is an out of control free-for-all. "Political correctness" and "walking on eggs" are apt descriptions of today's social behavior. Most worrying is the eerie sense that a lot of people just don't like anyone outside their own group. Stopping short of predicting multiple gun fights at high noon on any given day it is a genuine concern, perhaps widespread, that we are much less safe than our immediate predecessors. Finding motives for mass murders is an assignment for psychologists, not just police detectives.

Unraveling of Society

Here are the issues: The ethnic makeup of the US population is changing; religion is less important to recent generations; education (indoctrination?), while more widely available, appears to be dumbing down the hoi polloi while failing to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of commerce; the economy seems to favor a smaller sector of the populace, leaving behind the masses. If the US was a knitted item one could describe it as unraveling. Recent informative essays on the EU situation suggest the descriptive word "unraveling" fits exactly. It begs questions for us: Is the US as strongly glued together as we hope and believe it to be? Are the coastal blue states that much different from the red fly-over states that future cohesion is unachievable? There are some who would dissect California from the union and one wonders if there are other sizable wedges of the country pie that might be severed away. Trump wonders if millennials and their successors will have the cohesive conscience to defend a country that is perceived as foreign to the interests of many of them. We are very much in need of the proverbial "silver bullet". Perhaps the positive behavior of the securities markets is telling us that this uniquely different POTUS is kind of like the Lone Ranger astride a white horse, capable of creating a society that will reverse the concerns described above. We can only hope it is the case.