Hartford Courant - July 1, 2006

Poverty Fuels Anger, Violence
Arthur Bisaillon, West Hartford

In the last few weeks, The Courant has run several editorials and letters dealing with the proliferation of violence in Hartford and the country in general. One letter dealt with the negative effects of rap music [June 17, "Teens Definitely Get It"] and another with video games [June 26, "Making Profit Off Violence"].

I did not disagree with the writers, but I believe they are missing a much larger reason for the violence.

More rap music and video games are sold to middle-class Americans, yet there are not a lot of stories about innocent people being shot on the street corners of suburbia.

The violence is taking place predominantly in America's cities, where the masses of America's poor live. The violence is happening in areas where the majority of people are struggling to feed and care for their families; where people don't have enough money to take the family to the beach on a Saturday - forget about a couple weeks' vacation to rest and get back to their 60-hour-a-week, minimum-wage jobs.

We like to look at America as a place where anyone can achieve anything, and sometimes they do. We don't like to talk about the fact that the majority of wealth here is controlled by 5 percent of the population, or to say that the majority of young adults in this country and certainly in our cities will be unable to surpass the standard of living their parents enjoyed.

When people have little reason to have hope, they won't. When people are forced to deal with the stress of trying to feed their families, they will turn to drugs and alcohol and become more depressed and angry. That anger has been passed through the generations and continues to grow, and that is the biggest reason for the mess we have now.

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