[URBAN NOTE] "The War in San Bernardino"

[rfmcdonald]

Francis Wilkinson's long-form Bloomberg View article visits the California city of San Bernardino and finds little hope. What chance, he suggests, is there for positive change in a working-class city otherwise lacking economic prospects?

The terrorist attack on Dec. 2 left San Bernardino, California, with 36 shooting victims, 14 dead and 22 injured, and a spectral imprint of international terrorism. "This horrific murder underscores that we are in a time of war," said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie likewise viewed San Bernardino as a new front in a bitter clash of civilizations. "We need to come to grips with the idea that we are in the midst of the next world war," he said.

Yet less than two months after the shootings, the rituals of trauma in terrorism's aftermath, familiar from attacks in other locales, are routinely disregarded in San Bernardino, a struggling city of 210,000. In long interviews with city leaders or short conversations with residents, none felt compelled to mention where he or she had been at the fateful hour. Some presidential candidates seem to view the attack in San Bernardino as evidence of an existential threat to the nation, and invoke it every chance they get. In San Bernardino, it hasn't registered as an existential danger even to San Bernardino. It's rarely mentioned.

The threats to the city are nonetheless real. Some are even global in nature and surely devastating in effect. They have nothing to do with jihad.

San Bernardino has long been at war, and losing. The steady erosion of the American working class, with a commensurate rise in local poverty, has been killing the city for decades. It is now emblematic of some of the nation's most intractable problems -- violent crime, drug addiction, joblessness, urban blight, political dysfunction, low-skill immigration, white flight and widespread civic apathy. Like Detroit, the heaping culmination of those troubles ended in a municipal bankruptcy.