People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [397]
The alternative to such a bold program was to continue as before, allowing the cities to fester, forcing rural people to face debt and foreclosures, offering no useful work for the young, creating a marginal population of idle, desperate people, many of them young, many of them people of color, who turn to drugs and crime, constituting a threat to the physical security of the rest of the population.
The response of the government to such signs of desperation, anger, and alienation has been, historically, quite predictable: Build more jails, lock up more people, execute more prisoners. And continue with the same policies that produced the desperation. And so, by the end of the Clinton administration, the United States had more of its population in prison per capita—a total of two million people—than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of China.
Clinton claimed to be moderating his policies to match public opinion. But opinion surveys in the eighties and early nineties indicated that Americans favored bold policies that neither Democrats nor Republicans were willing to put forward: universal free health care, guaranteed employment, government help for the poor and homeless, with taxes on the rich and cuts in the military budget to pay for social programs.
The gap between national policy and the feelings of the American public suggested that another scenario was possible, one that envisioned, in the new millennium, citizens organizing to demand what the Declaration of Independence promised: a government that protected the equal right of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This meant economic arrangements that distributed the national wealth rationally and humanely. This meant a culture where the young no longer were taught to strive for “success” as a mask for greed.
Throughout the nineties, while conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats were running the government, there were large numbers of American citizens, unrepresented in Washington, unreported in the press, who were protesting government policy in various ways, and demanding a more just and peaceful society.
The signs of citizen energy outside the circles of power in Washington were not given much attention in the national media, except when a phenomenon was too big to ignore. Even a gathering of a half million adults and children, of all colors, arriving in the nation’s capital to “Stand for Children” was paid little or no attention by television and newspapers. The signs of defiance and resistance were many and varied.
In Minneapolis, there was a continuing campaign against a corporation that manufactured land mines. An ex-GI who had been mutilated by an American land mine came to Minneapolis to join the campaign, joined by a young woman who was traveling all over the world to tell people of the children dying on all continents as a result of millions of land mines planted by the United States and other nations. Four nuns, the “McDonald sisters,” who were indeed sisters, participated in the protest, and were arrested.
In 1994 in Los Angeles, in opposition to a new California law that took away basic health and educational rights from the children of illegal immigrants, a quarter of a million people took to the streets in protest.
When the United States made clear its intention to drop bombs on Iraq, presumably because Iraq was not allowing inspection of what American officials called “weapons of mass destruction,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other officials spoke to a town meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to build up public support for the bombing. But the planned scenario was interrupted by a young man who, despite plans to control all questions, managed to get the floor and ask Madeleine Albright about all the other nations, allies of the United States, that possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”
The Secretary of State was obviously taken by surprise and stumbled through an answer, which a national TV audience could plainly