SOCIAL UPHEAVAL: IGNORING HOPELESS A TERRIBLE RISK

In the days following the recent riots in Los Angeles, we have spoken with state and municipal officials in Missouri in an effort to learn how our state would deal with the economic-social-racial problems that are nearly as endemic here in the heart of America as they are on both coasts.

What we have heard from virtually all of these officials is, first, a disclaimer that Missouri's problems are as desperate as those in the ghettos of Los Angeles, New York and other huge metropolitan areas. The public officials we talked with in St. Louis and Kansas City seemed content to minimize their cities' problems because, they said confidently, Missouri's ghettos are more fragmented than those in California.

The second piece of logic that seems to be pervasive in Missouri is that, as desperate as conditions are in certain areas of our state, the degree of despair does not begin to approach the intensity in other urban centers. Apparently, it has become an article of faith among those who bear responsibility for the welfare of thousands of persons that there are actually degrees of hunger, and that for some unstated reason, the poor of Missouri are not as hungry as those who live on both coasts or in such urban hells as Washington, D.C., Detroit and Philadelphia.

These views by officials we consider to be responsible and knowledgeable about their home territories no doubt closely resemble the considered opinions held by elected officials in Los Angeles one day before the Rodney King verdict was ~handed down This not-in-my-backyard belief rendered many an "expert" opinion as invalid as the bylaws of the Flat Earth Society on the day the L.A. rioting-looting started.

If dissatisfied, impoverished and angry citizens can cause the deaths of some 50 persons, injure more than 2,000 and damage or destroy as many as 5,000 structures in Los Angeles, then the same kind of despair can do comparable damage in St. Louis or Kansas City or anywhere else in the state. And no amount of public confidence that such destruction is simply unthinkable in Missouri will stem the death and violence that is indigenous in far too many neighborhoods in our own state.

The unemployment rate in certain areas of urban Missouri now reaches 40 percent. The death rate among young black infants in St. Louis and Kansas City is higher than in many Third World countries. There are far more illegal drugs to be found in all areas of Missouri than in most of Asia and Africa. Both urban areas rate near the of top of the list in crime, and St. Louis just won the national title for the percentage increase in murders in 1991.

Not all of the potential for California-style violence and looting rests in our metropolitan areas. Wherever there is to be found high unemployment, widespread illegal drug use and poor to deplorable housing, the possibility of widespread trouble exists.

A state official in Jefferson City told us the day after the L.A. rioting began that the problem stemmed from coddling minorities, paying mothers to have illegitimate babies and a general indifference to law and order by anyone receiving an assistance check from the state or federal government. If this is an accurate analysis, then America has already started down the path to destruction and we will reach our destination far sooner than anyone expects at this moment. If social programs are the trigger to the fall of democracy, then we have certainly shot ourselves in the foot by trying to improve the lives of millions of Americans who have lost confidence not only in their leaders but, even more importantly, in themselves.

Many are old enough to remember the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, two programs that returned some degree of stability to families that 60 years ago were as economically deprived as those of the 1990s. Today we would probably call such plans national service, an idea that was endorsed several years ago by George Bush and which is one of the cornerstones of Bill Clinton's campaign. The programs did not solve all of America's problems back in the 1930s, and if reinstituted today would not solve all those facing us now. But they would provide the first hope for many persons who have long since given up trying to find ways to feed and support their families.

Today's WPA would begin to address the thousands of jobs that need to be performed to revive the country's infrastructure, while the CCC would not only protect the environment but would restore the self-respect of those who only a few days ago had nothing better to do than loot and steal. The costs would be paid by the savings in prisons and more welfare. W~e ignore the hopeless at terrible risk to America.