These are 2 letters I wrote to The Economist regarding the article:
"Where has all the greatness gone?"
Jul 20th 2010 12:00 GMT
The USA cannot pretend to promote democracy in the world when millions of its own citizens are disenfranchised. A country that has the world's highest rate of incarceration, that denies the vote to those it locks up, usually even after their release, cannot claim to be a champion of freedom. Taxation without representation is wrong, but incarceration without representation is far more evil. Convenient, however, for the police-judicial-prison-industrial complex!
Instead of treating the Constitution like Sharia Law and revering the founding Fathers like Muhammad the Perfect Man, Americans need to see them as the slave-owning, imperialist ethnic cleansers that they were, and drag their political system into the 21st century. The Electoral College, Senate rules and filibusters make a mockery of the will of the people.
Americans also need to become aware of other places in the world and of other people, if they want other nations to respect them in turn. If you look at an American field guide to North American birds, you will notice that the maps end at the Mexican border; the birds just disappear when they cross the Rio Grande. In 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted near Seattle; about 50 deaths; every American knows about it. In 1982 El Chichón erupted in Chiapas, Mexico, killing 2,000; 99% of Americans never heard of it because it didn't happen in the USA.
Where has all the greatness gone?
Jul 20th 2010 5:21 GMT
Richard D. Quodomine asks what is my solution to over incarceration in the US.
The problem is especially difficult because most criminal law, and consequently most incarceration, is state jurisdiction. Perhaps what is needed is a federal habeas corpus type statute that requires the state to prove, at regular intervals, that continued jailing of a person is necessary for public safety. In Canada this would be as simple as an act of Parliament, but in the US it might require a constitutional amendment. It would free a great many people and make large amounts of public money available for better things.
All citizens must have the right to vote, incarcerated or not, if the USA aspires to be a democracy. Prisoners can vote in Canada and, although I can't prove it, I think it has a rehabilitative effect.
The US needs to stop locking up citizens for drug possession, lower the drinking age to 18 and the age of sexual consent to 14 (which is what it was in Canada until the Harper Conservatives got hysterical and raised it to 16 recently).
The US needs to take 99% of its guns out of circulation and destroy them. It is true that people kill people, but with guns it is so easy that they kill many more people, and then something has to be done with the murderers. Just having a gun gives someone the concept of solving problems by killing someone; the same is true of having large armed forces.
The US needs to provide a route to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented immigrants within its borders who are being cynically exploited because they work hard, cheap and scared and don't join unions.
When Americans address these problems, and fix their health system, perhaps they will be entitled to speak of greatness. At the moment, America can only refer to its exceptionalism, its dysfunctionality.
