How can affluent and desperately poor live as two societies forever?

By David McElroy · April 24, 2013

I live in a middle class suburb about 15 miles west of downtown Birmingham. It has nice subdivisions and a collection of middle and upper-middle income families. It’s safe. I frequently walk the streets after midnight and don’t have a concern in the world. It’s a great place to live and a great place to raise children.

This past Sunday, I visited a different world for a few minutes. The contrast was scary. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

We all know there are parts of just about every city where “everybody knows not to go.” But even expressing the idea that way reveals a terrible bias. “We” know not to go there, by which we mean people with the money, education and the ability to live anywhere else.

Just before noon Sunday, I headed to downtown Birmingham because I wanted to catch Amtrak’s Crescent passenger train coming through, because I’d been wanting to shoot video of it. By the time I got to the station, the train was already in, so I needed to find a place just west of the station to catch it as it started leaving town.

I don’t know that part of town well. The part just to the west of the train station is industrial and the streets are cut up. Many of the buildings seemed abandoned, so it felt a bit like an industrial ghost town. I had to turn down confusing and cut up streets to find my way past the area. Using my iPhone’s GPS, I was able to see that if I’d head about six more blocks and then turn and head in another direction for four or five blocks, I should get to a railroad crossing not far from the main line after it left the station.

I was quickly scared. Nobody looked like me. The cars they drove were different from mine. They looked at me as though I were an alien.

I didn’t see any other white faces anywhere in the area. I didn’t see any other Acuras. People were staring. Fairly or unfairly, I imagined people thinking that the white boy either got lost or he was looking for a drug deal. I was terribly uncomfortable, and I can’t say how much of it was objectively because of others and how much of it was just from my own self-generated fears.

I’d obviously been through bad sections of various cities before (including this area), so I’m not naive enough to be unfamiliar with the way this felt. But as I watched the faces of poor black people looking at me with what appeared to be contempt, distrust or both, I was reminded again that we live in very different worlds. We live in entirely different societies.

A couple of police cars screamed by me at one point and I found them a minute later at a convenience store where there seemed to have been a robbery.

As I waited the five minutes before I knew the train would be leaving the station, I drove down a few side streets, but I quickly changed my mind about being there. I was scared. People stood on porches and stared at me. I felt very unwelcome even though I never spoke to any of them.

I stopped briefly and opened my car door to take a picture of the apartment building above. As soon as I took the picture and closed my door, a woman stepped out the door, placed her hands on her hips and glared at me.

I wasn’t welcome there.

I went to the railroad crossing and waited for the Crescent to come. The people in every car that passed stared at me. They didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust them, at least, as far as I could read expressions. They didn’t seem to want me in their neighborhood. I just wanted to get out.

The train came and I got my few seconds of video as it flew past. I quickly jumped into my car and drove away. I didn’t want to stay in their world any longer than I had to. Yes, I felt afraid, but I also felt very, very unwelcome.

I don’t know how to change the squalid conditions in which they live. Conservatives will tell you it’s all the fault of the poor and that they don’t have the right values to pull themselves out of poverty. Progressives will tell you it’s institutional racism and lack of aid from the rest of society that keeps them where they are.

There are elements of truth in each narrative. The culture in places like that pass terrible values along to the people who live there. They don’t learn the kind of values that most of us learn — the kind that are indispensable to success in the wider world. But these ghettos are largely the legacy of racism and legal discrimination for many, many years. When you spend a hundred years repressing people even after they’re free — and then suddenly grant the best and brightest in the community the ability to escape — what’s left is a cesspool of humanity with poor prospects and little knowledge of how to escape. They don’t even believe it’s possible. For most of them, it’s probably not possible.

I don’t know how to fix the problem, especially since the two different sides of the mainstream have such different narratives about why the problem exists (and since they tend to angrily argue when the subject comes up). The various things that have been tried haven’t worked. In fact, black families and communities are far worse off than they were prior to the black civil rights movement of the ’60s, because the educated and the successful have left them with no role models. The people there have more rights. They can vote. They can technically be whatever they want to be. They have the right to lift themselves out of where they are. But they don’t have the knowledge, the tools or the motivation to do those things, for the most part.

White people have mostly written them off and don’t want to acknowledge they exist. Black “leaders” treat them as political capital to use to gain money and power for themselves. (I used to work in Birmingham city politics, and I’ve seen that with my own eyes. It’s just a new form of exploitation.)

All I know is that this can’t continue forever. In a couple of decades (or so), white people are going to be a minority in this country. As that tipping point gets here, we’re going to see shifts in power and in economics. What’s going to happen as more and more of the minority poor feel they should have more of the economic pie (not really understanding how to make the pie bigger for themselves)? What’s going to happen when those of us in the comfortable (mostly white) suburbs find ourselves outvoted by people who want the wealth and lifestyle that we have? It’s a recipe for serious social unrest.

I don’t have any answers. But it breaks my heart to see what we’ve created. And it also fills me with fear to think what this could eventually lead to. I’m afraid it could be ugly. We need to have some serious discussions about this, but I don’t see that happening any time soon, because it will just devolve into the usual ugly Red vs. Blue arguments.

I don’t know what to do about it, but it scares me. It scared me driving around Sunday, but it scares me in a much different way when I think about the future.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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