Beyond all else the unceasing task of those who sit astride our culture and determine the pathways this society will follow is the imperative requirement to monitor with great care and attentiveness the seismic activity of our body politic.

Utilizing a broad array of tools that measure and calibrate both the content and intensity of public opinion and evolving and emerging preferences and the collective aspirations of the great majority of our populace, the community of professionals who serve the agendas of those who have accumulated enormous wealth and the corresponding efficacy to delineate the content of our present institutional realities and the prospective configurations and objectives that the future will hold.

The tactics are manifold and sophisticated and ever-changing.  In those areas of the United States where poverty is ascendant and intractable, a two-fold approach is frequently employed; to ensure relative calm and a state of compliance with local ordinances, particularly in those urban neighborhoods in which many of African-American descent reside, a police presence that is often brutal and suffocating to discourage protest and recrimination from these citizens who in lawful and constitutionally protected postures of free speech wish to convey their rage and the suffering which are the hallmarks of life in these grim and materially emaciated environments to which they are on a daily basis involuntarily subjected.

In concert with the preceding  a second tier of involvement is provided, i.e. minuscule contributions/donations by a phalanx of institutions to disburse a largesse which permits those at the helm of these entities to proclaim their  commitment to the welfare of those who dwell in poverty in these areas and their  promise to remain engaged in these communities to construct and deploy those ladders and elevators which can be scaled and boarded to rescue the poor from their horrific existences.

These specious and fraudulent overtures in no meaningful or substantive regard impact on the magnitude of poverty that obtains in these areas, nor do they other then in modes of presentation that are cosmetic and superficial address the structural causes of impoverishment which require both a comprehensive, multi-tier, multi-year,  strategic plan/process to both create the community enterprises which anchor institutions shall patronize to provide the financial resources required in the longer term to transform these neighborhoods into viable self-sustaining middle-class environments.

However, is this the summer of 2016, these strategies are becoming ever less effective as tools to subdue or pacify those 50 million Americans who comprise America’s underclass.

In exponentially expanding numbers, as the incidence of executions of African-American citizens by police forces in various cities is ascending, both within these communities as the result of such groups as “Black Lives Matter”, and beyond the perimeter of those geographic precincts, particularly among  Millenials who  are ferociously committed to civil liberties for all irrespective of racial or sexual considerations,  the tolerance for these acts of official lawlessness is evaporating, and is spawning reciprocal acts of violence by those who are by their actions though guilty of murder and behaviors which are morally intolerable,  are demanding that unprovoked attacks and the senseless slaughter of law-abiding citizens of color must cease.

Lest there be any confusion about the matter of the murder of our appointed guardians of our civil society for whatever the reason or purported justification it must be condemned and those who are guilty of their reprehensible attacks must be brought to justice and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

However, the solutions to our contemporary tensions and intensifying conflicts must be located within two complementary hemispheres of social reality; the first is the reformation of the manner in which  police forces are trained and deployed in these minority communities and function in a manner of decency and civility which is manifest in those sections of the cities in which middle-class white citizens reside, and most importantly that rather than a continuation of those programs and initiative which are empty palliatives and wholly inadequate initiatives that are instituted in these areas, a comprehensive strategic approach to the eradication of poverty must be implemented in these districts.

For in the final analysis when communities in which poverty and the suffering which it creates are transformed into middle class environments, the dysfunction and criminality which penury breeds will be greatly mitigated and those who are comfortably ensconced in lives of material sufficiency and will have little incentive to place the maintenance of a satisfactory existence at risk by engaging in behaviors that are self-destructive and may lead to lengthy periods of incarceration.

Should those who possess the capability to alter the contemporary social circumstances choose to remain committed to the failed policies of oppression and emaciated inducements, by so doing you immeasurably increase the probability that the discontent and justified rage which those who reside in these precincts are currently experiencing will  be augmented.  To mistakenly believe that these ominous increments can be quelled by an ever more oppressive police presence/aggressiveness is an exercise in collective self-delusion that will portend draconian circumstances and will exacerbate the current tensions in this society  and inevitably lead to greater bloodshed and ultimately the possibility of  a race war and or martial law.

These horrendous possible futures are to be avoided at all costs for they shall in some irrevocable regard consign  us to the forfeiture of our democratic traditions and the inception of a fascist state and the tragically lamentable demise of a system of governance that has however imperfectly endured for 240 years.

As November approaches the choice is stark and undeniable, and it resides with you who comprise those whose names appear on the list of those billionaires which are annually determined by Forbes publications to be the wealthiest among us; to truly place at risk our nation’s continuance due to a Trump hegemony. or to beyond the support for a Clinton administration, to commit in the councils of your contemporaries and in the priorities and policies to which you allocate your political influence and treasure the requisite resources to eradicate poverty in this nation.

Should you chose this course of action both those who support Donald Trump principally those white males who have been evicted from the middle class and are living lives of great unhappiness and material privation, as well as African Americans who have endured for centuries under the yoke of slavery and then poverty shall be lifted from their travails and their financial struggles and become members of a self-sustaining middle class.

From these actions will a nation be healed and an era of acrimony divisiveness and imminent national unraveling be relegated to an element of our national historical record that though enormously unsettling yielded to an era of reconciliation and a renewed and collective purpose in which all among  us will share with infinitely improved equity  and as a result rededicate themselves to a future of where inter-ethnic enmities have been evicted and we the children of immigrants shall celebrate our diversity and our cohesiveness.