Barbarians at the Gate

Natalie Arnanda wrote an article a few years ago – The Growth of Gated Communities and Their Impact on Social Segregation – and provided an explanation for this phenomenon: “Gated communities have always been with us. This dates back to the very earliest civilizations where the very wealthy have favored high walls and closed gates that have turned their communities into very private communities. In addition to providing increased security, the purposes of these communities were to foster segregation, and increase the sense of exclusion. Put bluntly, the rich desired to separate themselves from their less socially advanced neighbors.

“In recent years there has been an increase in the construction of gated communities in the United States. At the same time, these communities are becoming less the exclusive haven of the very rich, and have become more and more the choice of the upper middle class and even middle class homeowner. The major reason cited for this increase is the desire for more personal safety. Fueled by a media that almost constantly bombards us with images of violence and crime, people have become more fearful. The idea of the walls and the controlled access gates promises an escape from this fear. Inside the walls, surrounded by neighbors who share their values, people feel safer. They are not as fearful to approach old age, or raise their children there.”

The numbers behind this growth suggest that America is very worried about the threat of “have-nots” living in a job-impaired world versus those with assets to protect, particularly that 1% of the U.S. population that controls 42% of this nation’s wealth: “Across the United States, more than 10 million housing units are in gated communities, where access is ‘secured with walls or fences,’ according to 2009 Census Bureau data. Roughly 10 percent of the occupied homes in this country are in gated communities, though that figure is misleadingly low because it doesn’t include temporarily vacant homes or second homes. Between 2001 and 2009, the United States saw a 53 percent growth in occupied housing units nestled in gated communities.” New York Times, March 29^th. This doesn’t even include the doorman and security desk in apartment buildings in rich cities like New York, where this form of segregation has been part of the landscape for many years. Additionally, according to American-Business.org, private security in the United States has also grown into a $150 billion industry today.

As half of this nation now falls within the U.S. Census of low income or below the poverty line, as the differentiation between most senior corporate managers (200 to 300 times the pay of the average worker, with raises exploding at the top even in these impaired times), and as the wealthy pay some of the most favorable taxes in the industrialized world, the old maximum that the “rich get richer” appears to have created a new and dangerous polarization within our country, one that history teaches us (“let them eat cake!”) destroys societies though violent factionalization and armed conflict. But that could never happen here; this is America, the bastion of functioning democracy on earth, right? Well, this probably isn’t going to happen in my lifetime, but the forces of explosive social change are everywhere.

You many think of gang-infested inner city neighborhoods as aberrations, and let’s hope that is the explanation, but these enclaves have their own legal systems, economic hierarchies and social strata that literally function completely independently of the great American society that surrounds them. Wall Streeters have lower taxes (if they can qualify under the “carried interest” rule), great political clout (thank you Citizens United) and an entirely different rule system than the rest of us. Regardless of political bent, this country is simply breaking apart. It’s always one faction, seemingly incapable of reaching a working compromise (so painfully clear in our Congress), unbending in dealing with some other faction.

Add to this incredibly inflexible attitude in the minds of so many Americans and the extreme economic polarization that defines contemporary America with the right to bear arms. Wikipedia tells us that the United States has the highest ratio of gun ownership on earth (88.8 guns per 100 people; violent-plagued Yemen, for example, is only 54.8). We already have folks running to gated communities in fear, and within a number of gated communities, as the Trayvon Martin shooting illustrates, private neighborhood patrols add another potential level of violence to the equation.

This confluence of fear, widening polarization, intolerance and profound social change as the United States literally faces an entirely new specter of global competition and power shifts with the ready availability of guns seems to be moving our nation closer to the brink of the kind of revolution that none of us really believes will happen, but one that historians can support with ample proof through the ages of comparable societies that faced comparable fragmentation. Since no government lasts forever, is it time that those of us with the power to preserve and protect our precious nation begin to take steps to level the playing field and diffuse this polarization before it is too late. Or will that segment of the population that wants to preserve the special rules that enable their economic dominance be destroyed by their simultaneous embrace of the right to bear arms? If you love this country, embrace policies that will carry it along into the future, strong and free.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those of us just trying to make it day-by-day, dealing with preserving our entire nation and way of life just doesn’t show up on our personal radar… until it’s too late.