Try Googling “Is the system rigged?” I found: “FBI Director Comey: I need the American people to know the system is not rigged” “Trump on Clinton FBI announcement: The system is rigged” “71% of Americans believe economy is rigged” “The System Didn’t Fail Eric Garner. It Worked How a Racist System Is Supposed to”
The stories shared two disturbing qualities. 1) Each is about an American institution. 2) Each contended that some “system” is rigged. Those headlines introduce angry stories that are backed by at least a few grains of truth.
The people who brought down our financial system avoided prosecution and most of them kept their ill-gotten gains. There is energy for deporting undocumented immigrants and their children but very little for prosecuting employers who hire them without mandatory benefits and wages.
The FBI Director didn’t recommend prosecution of a Secretary of State who was careless with national security information because, he says, she didn’t intend to break any law. But when I unintentionally made an illegal right turn because I didn’t see the sign prohibiting it, I paid a fine.
We’ve seen people of African descent unjustifiably killed by police and the killers walked away. Black youth are arrested for possession of marijuana in convenience store parking lots but campus police don’t arrest white college students for the same offense.
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” That one-liner isn’t funny anymore. Unfairness, whether real or imagined, is a great danger because our freedom and democracy work well only when the great majority of us support the system and see it as fair.
It is the need for fairness, not fear of violence, that should drive our national conversation about these issues. The violence often comes from one deranged soul (lone wolf) not from Advocacy organizations. One enraged man (not associated with the Black Lives Matter movement) used their Dallas demonstration as an opportunity to kill five police officers. One Christian extremist (not associated with the Right To Life movement) shot five officers and six civilians at a Colorado Planned Parenthood Clinic. The movements express the concerns of substantial numbers of Americans about laws or institutions that they see as unfair. Most don’t promote violence.
During a previous era of dramatic social and economic change, when family farms and the shops of cobblers and blacksmiths were giving way to mechanized industries, America saw similar unrest and even greater violence. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act banning all Chinese immigration because their cheap labor was perceived as driving wages down. In 1887 there was a labor demonstration (The Haymarket Affair) in Chicago supporting an 8 hour work day. Someone threw a bomb. Gunfire followed. Seven police and at least four civilians died. In 1901, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist who blamed his unemployment on government policies. In 1920, Wall Street was bombed, apparently by an activist who believed that the financial system was rigged against him.
Recent events are strikingly similar to our history. Activists and political candidates promise to fix rigged systems with simplistic ideas: Exclude immigrants. Build a wall. Block trade treaties. Hold police accountable. Enforce law and order. Many Americans believe that “other” Americans are rigging our institutions (the system) against them, and that does not bode well for our future.
Our nation’s systems for finance, justice, law enforcement, health care, education and others that compose our national identity must be perceived as fair for all of us. We’ll need genuine improvements in fairness, not just slogans and polite listening. Otherwise we will continue to experience demonstrations and rage from those who believe that systems are rigged against them.
After successful efforts to pass civil rights and voting rights laws, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. shifted his attention toward economic justice by addressing financial and wage issues affecting Hispanic and white workers as well as blacks. At the time of his assassination he was in Memphis supporting a strike for higher wages by public sanitation workers. Nearly half a century later many issues of economic and racial justice have not yet been addressed. Now is the time to improve, not because of fear but because our national sensitivity to fairness has been raised. It is said that “Most people don’t read the writing on the wall until their backs are up against it.” I can feel the wall now.