Perfect Storm

I read the other day that by 2043 the U.S. will be majority-minority --- several years earlier than predicted by those who spend their time predicting such things. Said study broke the demographics down by Latinos (called Hispanics as though all Spanish-speaking people are somehow of identical ethnicities), Blacks, Asians, mixed-race people and whites.

As of today, the majority of children under 5 are also “minority.” Even the lingo we’ve become accustomed to using doesn’t serve in this new and inexorably approaching reality. At the same time (meaning today, already, current reality) those people of color under 18 are an almost majority, constituting over 40% and gaining fast. By 2019 the majority of all U.S. children will be "minority."

This pronouncement was made as if nearly every white person in the U.S. didn’t already have at least one relative among the duskier peoples. For decades now, cousins and in-laws and sisters and brothers have been persistently and ostentatiously mingling with people of color of all stripes; and like most phenomena not acknowledged until it reaches critical mass, these matches have been noted anecdotally but not accounted for statistically and thus not considered official.

The largest population segment by growth has been in mixed race people. Big surprise, right? An unhappy coincidence, or should I say co-ink-a-dink, is the fact that the poverty rate for children under 5 is over 20% of the total population, and much higher than that when broken down by race.

Children account for the highest percentage of the poverty-stricken and children of color constitute the majority of that group by far. Another statistic of recent note involves cutbacks to K-6 education. Pre-school, Head Start, ESL and other programs aimed at providing educational services for the largest growing segment of the population are being decimated at the same time as their constituents are blossoming in numbers.

Considering that many states spend far more on prison construction than higher education and have more young men of color in prison than in college, this is the perfect storm --- the trifecta of the Apocalypse. We are racing toward the future on a four-horse chariot. One horse is pulling on the reigns of poverty, another mis-education, a third the prison-industrial complex and the fourth the mob of the underclass made strong by the other three. It’s like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past sheltering the children of destruction within his cloak.

When you consider the growing economic divide against the backdrop of the encroaching demographic and all that it portends, we are racing toward destruction at an accelerating clip. Those children, routinely and hypocritically decried as our future are our future permanent underclass who are fodder for a system that is vicious enough to so categorize them while too stupid to realize that by their numbers they will overwhelm all else.

This analysis is undeniable. It is only the result of the continuation of current demographic trends that are open and obvious. This is proof that we are hard-wired to orchestrate our destruction; that the cycles of life and growth and decline and decay will prevail as they always have.

So when the under 5s join the under 18s, become adults and form the majority of the U.S. population –- a population dominated by people of color –these same people will be poor, uneducated, ex-cons, unemployable for anything but the lowliest labor, disenfranchised and pissed the fuck off. The 1% will have pushed the engine of the people to the place where they have no place to go and nothing to lose, and the people will rise. And Babylon will fall.