When America's Pathologies Come to Your Hometown

Big town, small town, college town - America's deficiencies are pervasive and inescapable

Yesterday’s slaying of a young UNC associate professor by his grad student is unfortunately not the first time that the harsh realities of American life have intruded on bucolic Chapel Hill, my home for the past 18 years and a truly wonderful place to live.

I was in only my second year of teaching at both Duke and UNC in 2006 (ironically about al-Qaeda related terrorism) when a delusional Muslim extremist drove a rented SUV through a crowded student area on the UNC campus known as “The Pit.” Mercifully, no one was critically injured. The perpetrator pled guilty to nine counts of attempted murder.

Two years later, a beloved UNC student body president was abducted at gunpoint outside her off-campus housing by two criminal thugs. They forced her to withdraw $700 from her ATM, then brought her to a wooded neighborhood street and executed her in cold blood, shooting her five times with the last fatal blow through her skull. I visited that residential street a mile from campus and about two miles from my home. It looked just like mine.  Her moronic soulless abductors are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In 2015, an angry middle-aged man in Chapel Hill stormed his neighbors’ apartment with a handgun and murdered a UNC dental student, his aspiring dental-student wife, and his wife’s sister. The assailant’s wife and law enforcement authorities quickly jumped to the conclusion that the gunman mentally cracked due to a parking dispute, but most everyone that has looked closely at the case knows he targeted these three young people due to their Muslim identity.

We don’t know that much yet about what happened in Chapel Hill yesterday. But having lived in China for six months, I can say for sure, if this disturbed Chinese national student had a serious grievance with his professor in China, he most certainly wouldn’t have been able to lawfully obtain a firearm to assassinate him in the workplace in the middle of a school-day afternoon. 

I love America and wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else.

But we have to understand that America suffers from many deep and overlapping pathologies that diminish our quality of life and eviscerate the concept that we are an exceptional nation that provides a compelling model for the rest of the world to emulate.

We do many things wonderfully that deserve praise and respect, but also do so many things woefully wrong to our shame. And what makes our deficiencies so tragic is that we cannot blame them on lack of economic or natural resources and intellectual capital. We have them all in abundance. Yet still we suffer.

Readers of this newsletter know America’s deep pathologies are, but they are worth listing them anyway.

Our economic foundation was built on the myth of race hierarchy that categorized certain humans as property. We have moved over two and a half centuries from chattel slavery to civil war to a failed reconstruction to the apartheid of Jim Crow to the civil rights revolution. Yet race still infects every aspect of our society, divides us and cripples our ability to unify and grapple with our societal challenges.  

We have massive economic inequality that far exceeds the inequality in other advanced economies. Look at many of our big problems – crime, poor health, broken families – and economic inequality is almost surely at its root.

We have a proliferation of firearms in our country unequaled in the entire world. By one estimate, there are almost 400,000,000 civilian firearms in America, which is about 120 firearms for every 100 persons (and that includes children under 18!). The number of civilian firearms in America exceeds the total number for the next 24 most-armed countries in the world combined. We have well-over double the number of firearms per capita than the 2^nd country on the list (Yemen) and almost 4 times the number of firearms per-capita than the next most-armed industrialized country in the world – our friends to the north, Canada. 

Race, inequality, and guns – these are modern America’s deepest afflictions.

There is no place in America that is immune from their spiraling consequences.