I keep thinking about the demographics in this article in Tuesday’s NY Times.
“Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.”
It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider other groups of people, say, for example, the students in your local school district, and think about what the reaction would be if 1/6th of them were gone. I was going to say “suddenly gone”, but that’s probably part of the problem. When things happen gradually, then they can appear normal, come to be accepted as just the way things are, if your time perspective is a local one.
The online article has some good graphics to help us think about the data.
