After years of negotiation, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Orin Hatch were finally able to pass their anti-gang bill. In essence, the bill will make it easier to classify youth as members of gangs, and intensify the penalties for those who are charged with crimes. Despite its devastating implications, particularly for young people of color, the legislation was uncontested by Senate colleagues and publicly celebrated as a victory in the “War on Gangs.” As always, the language of war was used to sanitize a filthy set of politics.
For decades, politicians have used the rhetoric of war in order to draw public support for questionable domestic policy initiatives. In 1971, President Nixon launched a full scale “War on Drugs” that has heavily tipped the criminal justice scales against poor people, petty drug users, and small time dealers. More recently, after the September 11 tragedy, President Bush unleashed a War on Terror that has undermined any semblance of individual privacy and civil liberty for the entire nation.
In case you haven’t noticed, there is a disturbingly consistent pattern here. First politicians create a common enemy. Not a real enemy, but an indefensible bogeyman –say, a suicide bomber or a crack rock– that we all agree is bad for society. Then they tell us that we are facing an immediate threat because of this bad entity. Once everyone is sufficiently (and irrationally) scared of our “enemy,” the government then prosecutes a war in order to snuff it out. Given the bellicose nature of American society, this becomes a reasonable if not axiomatic conclusion. After all, if you don’t support a war against bad things then you must a supporter of bad things, right?
By playing these language games, we are able to ignore clear evidence that these faux-wars don’t work. Thirty-six years into the current drug war, drugs are easier to find, cheaper to buy, and more potent than ever. Since the beginning of the war on terror, Americans have lost layers of freedom with no indication, regardless of what Bush says, that we are any safer. With the current war on gangs, we are bolstering a prison industry without affecting the root causes of gang membership and youth crime.
My suggestion is that we rename our wars in more honest fashion. Imagine how the public would respond if they knew politicians were proposing a “War on the Constitution” or a “War on Mexican Teenagers.” Perhaps, after recognizing the real stakes, we could begin a much-needed “War on Wars.”
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Another "war" on people of color.
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