Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...aged young and offers life-support systems only to those who can afford them. That would be the Owners, an elite who inhabit high-rise fortresses in Manhattan. The armed towers keep out the "aliens," variously known as Starkies, Skells, Trolls and Roaches. They are part of a vast underclass, disinherited by global economic collapse and lingering radioactive wastes. The O-Zone itself is the result of a nuclear-dump accident in the Ozarks, "a place that had once been wooded and parklike and settled, and was now a prohibited area, dangerous and empty, with burst-open roads and fallen...
...promote hideous realities. The worst is a pornography of violence practiced by a private police force known as Godseye. They roam Manhattan's abandoned neighborhoods in murderous gunships looking for excuses to "burn" the Starkies, Skells or whatever other name they can devise to distance themselves from the underclass...
During a decade of tremendous growth, Sunbelt cities attracted millions of people from the depressed urban centers of the North. All the ills of urban ghettos went with the newcomers, and many Southern cities, with their underclass populations suddenly exploding, became ripe environments for gangs to develop and flourish...
...jobs. Nicholas Lemann, in an incisive series in the Atlantic, analyzes how the migration of poor blacks into the inner cities and the outward migration of middle-class blacks have created a destructive ghetto culture. It can only be broken, Lemann argues, by providing public-works jobs that get underclass blacks out of the ghetto...
Democratic Party leaders are beginning to wrestle with radical approaches like these. Many of the panelists at last week's forum discussed the need to provide jobs, experiment with workfare initiatives and find ways to shape Government programs so that they encourage, rather than discourage, self-help among the underclass. But as Moynihan noted, "We are grievously short of specific ideas." For the Democrats to regain the initiative on what has traditionally been one of their most important issues, the quest to conquer the problems of poverty in America, they will have to find ways to sharpen the ideas that...