Saturday, December 19, 1998

Lessons for a rapidly dividing nation

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

I read about the golfers and thought about the goats. Let me explain.

A golfer shot one of three youths trying to rob a foursome at a DeKalb County golf course last week. The fact that the golfer was packing -- and needed to be -- is just more proof that this country is going Third World faster than you can holler "FORE!"

We have more and more gated communities, and by that I don't mean charming, courting gates swinging off of picket fences like in a Jimmy Stewart movie.

I mean guarded gates on high fences, keeping the haves safe and the have-nots out.

We have people driving cars that cost more than houses, and we have the homeless camping out on steam grates and foraging trash bins for food.

We have plastic surgeons with enough clients to populate a pretty city, and sophisticated heart surgeries and organ transplants for those who can afford them; and we have millions with no health insurance.

The middle class is disappearing, and you don't hear much about it.

Politicians are too busy investigating one another's sex lives even to raise the minimum wage. But you can see the result. You see it everywhere.

The United States is not aging and maturing in a civilized way.

We have country club golfers and we have those desperate enough to steal. There's not a whole lot in between anymore.

A decade ago I went to see a friend with the U.S. State Department who was assigned to Kingston, Jamaica. Each morning her driver took her to work, then came back to the apartment to ferry me around.

Inside that apartment were "rape gates" on each interior bedroom door, just in case an assailant got past the complex gate with its 24-hour guard, and then past the bars on the front door.

I would tell the driver what places in Kingston I most wanted to see, and sometimes he'd simply answer, "That's not safe."

He brooked no argument.

One day my friend suggested the driver take me to the beach for some of the famous fried fish. Cooks wait on shore for the fishermen to return, then cook up the catch right there on the beach beneath makeshift sheds.

It's about as fresh a fish as you can ever hope to eat.

We drove past the usual high-contrast Kingston sights -- mansions behind walls topped with bits of jagged glass to deter prowlers, the cardboard huts with scrap-tin tops where people lived until the next hurricane blew them away -- to the beach.

Once there, the driver paid two boys a pittance to watch the car. They would, he explained to me, keep it safe from both the thieves and the goats.

Sure enough, all around, unattended cars had goats on top of them. The hungry goats were trying to reach the higher leaves on scraggly vegetation. No respecters of automobiles, they sought the highest point to get what they needed to survive.

Jamaica was one of the most beautiful, and depressing, places I've ever visited. Even 10 years ago, it seemed inconceivable to me that our country would ever find itself divided into such extremes of wealth and need.

Now it would seem to be just a matter of time. America quickly should admit it doesn't know everything and look to countries that have figured out how to repair social disparities without retreating behind walls topped with broken glass. (Countries not scared of a national health insurance plan, for instance.)

How good can The Good Life be when you have to repair to walled/gated/guarded places to practice it?

Fear is constant and pervasive. It is country clubbers' golfers wearing gun holsters at tee time, and goats atop Mercedes, scrambling for a bite.

King Features Syndicate