Sherman N. Miller

Recently I took my older granddaughter, Sierra, to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Zoo for her first time at seeing the animals. We were both excited because it was a beautiful day. We arrived around 11:30 a.m., so we had to park in one of their secondary lots about four blocks away. As I pushed her stroller down Girard Avenue, I saw a couple of houses that looked like a bomb had hit them in an air raid. I felt pity for the people living in that block because it was a scene that I might expect in a third world nation.

My wife had been on a business trip in Detroit and I picked her up at the Philadelphia airport since it was on our path home. As fate would have it, she came in late on a Northwest flight that landed at a TWA gate; therefore, I was really not sure where she would be. To compound our dismay there was an eight mile back up reported on the interstate going home.

We decided to follow the old route home. It was as though people stuck on Interstate 95 had no idea of the existence of Route 291, so we moved readily through the neighborhoods. But the trip through Chester, PA was very disheartening.

We remembered the Chester route as having been full of life; however, today it is a No-Man's Land that time forgot. My dander started to rise because Chester truly symbolized that we are allowing this nation to degenerate into a third world nation. There were buildings with barb-wire around the roofs or decayed structures everywhere.

We did get a bit of solace when we saw where a bulldozer had pushed a couple of houses down so nature could recapture this land. But my anger at all of this was underpinned by my grappling the question, "Did we ignore the downside despair forced upon many inner-city poor Americans as a result of our current enchantment with globalization?"

The Chester experience ran counterpoised to all of the rhetorical jubilation we heard touting the virtues of globalization in creating jobs. We quickly learned that globalization is a code word for exporting good American jobs to foreign lands with cheap labor and legitimating employment insecurity as a key means to control inflation. There is another quiet and potentially very deadly downside of globalization which is the reincarnation of the concept of chattel in Mainstream America's psyche.

Thus relegating Inner-city Americans to chattel is ample reason to see them as mere economic casualties of the present raging global economic war. I broached this thinking with a Jewish senior citizen couple from Dover, Delaware. They argued strongly that goodness should begin at home and American tax dollars should not be used to underwrite American industries to build plants overseas at the expense of our own people.

When I ponder hearing economic pundits getting upset that the national unemployment rate may fall below 5 percent kindling inflation, I am haunted by the urban blight in Chester. Thus, I ask, "Has the American psyche hardened so much to poverty where we now exploit the numbers of street people and blighted neighborhoods as economic indicators of future inflation potential?"