America's Political Climate

With Saturday's shootings in Arizona, lot of things are being said about political climate in US. First of all I am very clear on one thing. Violence of any kind is bad.. bad..  Secondly, it is too early to comment on real motives of the shooter/killer. We can't say that he was politically motivated or lunatic or some other reason for his actions. I guess, press will have field day for next couple of weeks/months covering all about this. I hope rest of the wounded survive and get well soon..

Now, my view on this.. there are at least couple of factors responsible for this thing.. First is very obvious, easy access to firearms in USA to anyone.. Second is current state of economy and due to policies for last couple of decades, loss of middle class jobs..

I will start with second reason first.. which is resulting in bigger social divide in nation. There are jobs but they are either very high paying jobs in knowledge based industry or very low paying service jobs. For these high paying jobs you need great professional knowledge and education. For these low paying service jobs you will have to compete from immigrants. Due to bad policy decisions in past couple of decades, America lost lot of its middle class jobs which needed average education. These jobs at time were replaced by very high paying high tech or hight end knowledge based jobs. However, policy makers forgot to prepare workforce for these high end jobs. Right approach should have been to spend more money on education and improve quality of K-12 education. At the same time make college education entrance barrier low so average middle class family don't have to shiver while filling college applications due to high fees. This resulted in further divide between rich and poor.

Similar situation is there in India as well. There is big segment of population which is making good money due to their education. However, 400 million people who are still below poverty line (Indian Poverty line!!!) largely remains un-affected by this massive growth. There should be big social unrest in India too.. But there is hardly any..

What is the difference.. I think it is First factor listed in my note. Easy access of firearms in USA. There is no restriction as long as you don't have any criminal record. So barrier to commit first time crime is very low. Problem here in US, is that any one can be mad at anything and go buy guns or something like that and vent out. This can create very easy social unrest here which is not the case in India. These type of things will increase in here as more and more social divide increases.. I hope our policy makers will be able to take some lessons and try to contain this growth in divide.