What doesn't make its way into the civics books. The America that got left behind

BILL MOYERS: What is it about the crime scene that gives you a keyhole, the best keyhole perhaps, into how American society really works?

DAVID SIMON: Right. You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn't make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because THE WIRE is not a story about the America, it's about the America that got left behind.

So much of America has been left behind because our working class people who held the manufacturing jobs are now expendable. As long as the drug trafficers stay in the inner city everyone will tolerate it. When the white kid from the suburbs gets killed suddenly there is interest and concern but as long is it is brown kids killing other brown kids nobody cares.

Our society has become one of social dawinism where working class and lower class folks are expendable either through murder or incarceration. Over 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States which has the highest incarceration rate by far than any other first world countries. It is ironic, really, to observe that white, working class Americans in rural America are paid by government to guard in prisons brown inner city peoples. One race and class preying on another and politicians pandering to this system for votes from Correction Officer unions in all the states.

Inner city schools are not about education but about child care and supervising otherwise idle youth. That's what they are paid to do. School, as far as education goes in cities, is a joke. No one takes it seriously and you only have to look at the drop out rates to understand this point. These kids who drop out of school look to the black market to support themselves economically because there is no other way and America doesn't care. These populations have no value and therefore are expendable. Taxpayers in New York State would rather spend $35,000.00 per year to keep a person in prison than to provide assistance with job training and economic stablility.

In our new America if you are lower class or working class and even lower middle class if you family has no wealth you are screwed. And the culture doesn't care. It waits for you to fail and offend and then scoops you up and warehouses you at taxpayers expense until you are released and then 2/3rds of the time re-offend and are re-incarcerated.

It's a game and one that is not taught in our civics texts. Americans live in a dream world of myth that you get rich by putting your hand in someone else's pocket, engaging in black market activities, or playing the lottery. Education and hard work are no longer valued because they don't pay off. The people who get ahead and who are emulated are the Bernie Madoff's, the Ken Lay's, and the politicians who all retire millionaires from a few years of public service.

In our current society, if you work hard and are honest, you are considered a chump and get the poverty you deserve. You get rich by "leveraging assetts" and usually they are other people's assetts so you don't get stung when the investments go sour.

This is article #2 in a series on David Simon's interview with Bill Moyers.