War Zone: Poverty

While listening to This American Life this morning, I stumbled upon act two of the eye opening of an segment "Doppelgängers". The segment consists of two interviews conducted by Alex Kotlowitz; who you may know as the author of There Are No Children Here or the producer of the award winning documentary The Interrupters. Kotlowitz decided to conduct the two interviews after hearing about a program at Drexel University in Philadelphia offering counseling for PTSD symptoms (something most Americans would associate solely with war veterans) to people from inner-city neighborhoods.

In these two interviews, Kotlowitz compares the life of a war veteran from Afghanistan (Brandon Caro) to the life of someone growing up in a rough neighborhood in north Philadelphia (Curtis Jefferson). Some striking similarities were found. The first similarity was that they both could never let their guard down. They also had both seen people be killed, as well as been severely injured themselves. Traumatic experiences like this have taken a toll on both interviewee's mental health. In fact, their mental health was so terribly damaged that both of them attempted suicide.

The similarities kept coming, but what I found to be even more striking than the similarities, was the main difference. Brandon was able to come home from that stress filled, high intensity lifestyle, but Curtis still lives in the same neighborhood. After being shot 5 times Curtis now has to walk bent over and he fears that this sign of weakness will make him the target of violence and crime that continues to ravage his neighborhood. So I'll offer you the same question Kotlowitz does: Can Curtis' post traumatic stress really be considered post?

I would argue that considering Curtis has to live constantly looking over his shoulder, and continues to see violence, his traumatic stress is no way "post".


So if there are neighborhoods on American soil that can cause people to have on-going traumatic stress, usually associated with war-zones, I wonder why we are spending 20% of the federal budget, a staggering $689 billion, on Defense and International Security Assistance each year. It seems to me that the government should spend a little less money trying to build up an absurdly large arsenal of weapons to supposedly prevent war, and should spend a little more money helping to end the war-zone like conditions that some Americans have to face everyday. To quote hip-hop legend Mos Def, "69 billion in the last 20 years, spent on national defense but folks still live in fear" (from "Mathematics" released in 1999).

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that instead of focusing on enemies abroad we should look for/create enemies in our own country and start something like, say, a war on drugs? This war, which, by the way, costs the federal government at least $100 billion every year. Instead, I'm saying we should increase the amount of money we spend on things like education (2% of the federal budget) and safety net programs (12% of the federal budget); things that will help people break the cycle of poverty and stay out of prison, rather than keep them in poverty and get them into prison. If our government changed the way they spend their citizen's tax dollars in this way, it would change the lives of many Americans who are in most desperate need of change.