The above quotation comes from the inestimable Martin Luther King, Jr., of which, that quote continues with: “The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, and segregated and humiliated at every turn.” Regrettably, the slums that existed back when King first made this speech in 1966, still exist today, and arguably are even more segregated, more oppressive, and the people that live within them, are in an even more hopeless state.
While on the one hand, humankind has advanced tremendously since King’s time, in the sense of its technological, material, and other impressive achievements; what has disappointingly not occurred in this country subsequently, is its governance making it a true priority and therefore putting forth the effort to do something of real substance to ameliorate and to correct the pitiful conditions that so many Americans are born into and live within. Clearly, this is a reflection, that the highest levels of governance cares not a whit about the poor and disadvantaged in this nation; and that the commercial enterprises that make billions upon billions of dollars in profit, each and every year, invest none of it, in uplifting those that need to be uplifted, the most.
How is that this country can devote billions upon billions of dollars to the killing of foreigners, in these endless wars, and not want to actually put some teeth into its own “war on poverty?” In reality, America, desperately needs to get its own house in order. The hypocrisy that “God blessed America,” is exposed by the fact that Christianity, by definition, is that religion which is founded upon the principle that we are to love our neighbor as ourself, which in America is belied by the fact of all of those neighbors that are confined to the slums; of which, they are apparently both out of sight and effectively out of mind, with the sole exception of those so exploiting them for their personal benefit at the expense of those that are ill-educated, disadvantaged, and un-championed.
The energy, the perseverance, and the drive to take our slums and to thereby actually make something out of them, is something that this country, with all of its wealth, and all of its hard-working well-educated people, should be able to achieve, in a reasonable period of time; if only this country and its people, devoted and concentrated the necessary resources to fundamentally correct and to ameliorate the situation as it is, right now.
The poor and the disadvantaged are deliberately segregated from the population at large, in the futile attempt to pretend that they don’t actually exist, when they most certainty do. America needs to fully recognize this must important and salient point, which is that every healthy newborn child has the innate disposition to explore, to learn, and to become something of merit; and what kills these childhood dreams in the slums, more than anything, is the surroundings and the infrastructure that they are trapped within and inundated by -- which consists of unsafe neighborhoods, police harassment, injustice, dilapidated and poorly functioning schools, as well as broken families – all this, while also typically being devoid of any meaningful employment of any real worth within their neighborhood.
This country already incarcerates hundreds and hundreds of thousands of its own citizens; of which, if we fairly designated slums as another form of incarceration, this then becomes millions upon millions of our citizens, effectively treated as something which is less than human, and therefore of no real concern to the state.