Can the US handle new little tribal bloodfest reassembling in its midst?

I visit Pittsburgh infrequently, my last visit there was in 2017 two years ago. Our host is a university professor at Carnegie Mellon, an American born in Uganda, who scaled professional heights to the American Academy of Sciences. Squirrel Hill where the massacre at the synagogue occurred is home to leafy homes clustered in germane order and nice restaurants. While the Jewish community is older, there are newer younger vibrant communities the Persians, Arabs and, of course, Hispanics. Like other parts of America, the two oldest communities, white and black, occupy the extreme ends of town, divided by a large highway.

This feeling is replicated everywhere. In Baltimore, security forces mount full ground patrols in the inner harbour where tourists from all over the United States live, again separated from the downtown proper by the Jones expressway. Up in the downtown, its nearly mayhem, drugs, pan handlers and anxious suburbanites trying to jump on the least inclusive form of public transportation, the light rail out of the city. The light rail connects the more desirable suburbs unlike the subway, which cuts through downtown, is 40 years old and will never be extended or rehabilitated.

In other cities, like Boston, minority enclaves have simply disappeared altogether due to gentrification. The story of Harlem neglected for years and now praised as an urban mecca, hides what public housing has been doing for years - shipping welfare recipients to out of the way suburban communities where they are hived off from the main communities to provide cheap labour to companies like Wal Mart, whose employees rely on welfare.

The economic stress of massive deregulation, privatisation, and de-industrialisation in the West has created various categories of angry people. In fact, contrary to popular belief, it’s not the young black and Hispanic male who are the staple of America’s prison system. The black male was overrun a long time ago and is simply an instrument of whatever else ails America - drugs, guns, youth joblessness, etc. The angriest people in America are the white male, black female.
Mr Donald Trump, 72, rode to the White House basically by mobilising more than 60 per cent of white males to deliver him winning margins in states like Pennsylvania where the Pittsburgh shooting occurred, Florida, etc. Ms Maxine Waters, 79, a Democratic Congresswoman, has her own version of getting back at the system promising hell on earth if Democrats win back the House of Representatives next Tuesday.

In the new dispensation, Americans worship separately, live separately, travel separately, and of course, vote differently. There are smaller clusters of less polarised sub-groups - white women, married women vote with white men, and single women vote with minorities. In the cream of society that accounts for less than 10 per cent of the population, these national struggles occur on a smaller, but more protracted scale. Sexual harassment, racial discrimination in the workplace, but even more systematic segregation like redlining minority neighbourhoods for higher mortgage rates is a problem.

It finally dawns that the dialectical rules of physical matter, that matter is fixed and particulate are in full swing. There is not enough American prosperity to go around. Even an innocent initiative like Obamacare is out to grab the little the privileged had due to a longer history of employment healthcare. The old high school education, in the US, it’s called a degree was a meal ticket to well-paying blue-collar jobs paying upwards of $70,000 per year with overtime enough to live off of, drive a new truck, pay the bills and put the children through to college. Pricey America’s whose colleges are suffering disenrollment are scrambling now for Chinese, not American children due to a deteriorating education system.

Regular Americans long hostile to each other are arming up, legally. Dubious schemes like legalization of marijuana will surely destroy what’s left of the cities. Global economic shifts will crush the rural areas. Joe the Plumber of 2008 is quickly turning into Joe the really Angry Man of 2018.

Mr Ssemogerere is an attorney-at-Law and an advocate. [email protected]