By Chris Powell
When three young men from Bridgeport were shot, one fatally, another mortally wounded, in a car on the Wilbur Cross Highway in Hamden early New Year’s Day, state police called it “an isolated incident.” This meant that the crime was not believed related to any other crime or prospective crimes, did not indicate a threat to others, and so should not cause more alarm.
But police throughout Connecticut long have been reporting similar “isolated” incidents of mayhem nearly every day. While the incidents seldom involve the same perpetrators, they [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] related in another and crucial sense.
For most of these incidents emerge from something to which Connecticut’s intelligentsia and most state residents pay no attention — a burgeoning underclass that lives in a world of its own, without connection to the communities covered by news organizations.
These people live on the fringes of society, scraping out a living in menial jobs or the informal or illegal economies, especially the drug trade, which will [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] be eliminated by state government’s clumsy legalization of marijuana and use of its regulated retailing as political patronage.
The New Year’s Day incident in Hamden fairly could be called a mass shooting, the kind of thing that sends the intelligentsia into hysterical clamor for more “gun control.” But since the incident involved the underclass and may have been just the brutal end of another drug transaction, it passed unremarked and was quickly superseded by shootings elsewhere in the state.
Connecticut is known as a wealthy state, and it’s not surprising that the rest of the country doesn’t recognize that the state has a large underclass, since the state itself hardly recognizes it, even as the underclass took over the state’s cities many years ago. State government seems to think that its huge and ever-increasing appropriations in the name of rehabilitating the cities are working.
But these appropriations mainly just distract from their longstanding [ITALICS] failure, [END ITALICS] and they facilitate the dismissal of the evidence of this failure as “isolated incidents.”
As long as social disintegration can be dismissed as “isolated incidents,” no one in authority will be compelled to inquire into the genesis of the underclass. That genesis may include perpetual poverty, child neglect, and educational failure — heavy stuff.
But the biblical observation that “the poor you will always have with you” needn’t be construed as Connecticut seems to construe it, as command or excuse for indifference and irrelevance. Instead it may have been a lament. Things can’t be fixed until they are seen and understood. The underclass isn’t — at least not in Connecticut.
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BLUMENTHAL’S BLUSTER: Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, re-elected in November to a third six-year term, remains fairly adept at identifying the failures and offenses of corporations, as the other day he blustered about the breakdown of operations at Southwest Airlines amid a winter storm that snarled transportation throughout the country.
The senator proposed legislation to guarantee all sorts of financial reimbursement to airline passengers whose flights are canceled or delayed or who lose their luggage. This is a fair issue, though such legislation probably will increase the cost of air travel.
But with perfect irony, even as Blumenthal was announcing his legislation, the breakdown of a federal air traffic control center was causing serious delays for more than 130 flights into and out of southern Florida. Would the senator’s legislation also require the [ITALICS] federal government [END ITALICS] to reimburse passengers for that kind of thing?
The senator says the airline industry is full of monopolistic practices. So where is his rebuke of the Justice Department for not already having brought antitrust enforcement to bear against those practices?
Indeed, the failures of the federal government are infinitely more costly to Americans than the failure of Southwest Airlines, but they often have gotten a pass from the senator. For example, where do Americans go for a refund of the trillions spent on the failed 20-year nation-building experiment in Afghanistan, whose appropriations the senator always supported? What about the blank checks lately being sent by the federal government to Ukraine with the senator’s endorsement? Will Ukraine become another forever war?
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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 