It's late, I've had too much to drink and this may not be very coherent.
Back in the day when I was a young Army officer about to go to Vietnam as an "advisor" on my second tour, we all were required to read and discuss Ted R. Gurr's "Why Men Rebel." (You may have heard of the"Vietnam War" -- it was in all the newspapers back in the '60's and was the original foreign policy fuck up.)
Gurr -- then a professor of something at Northwestern -- in 1970 published the results of his field and literature research into the question of why people decide to take up arms and risk all they have to rebel against The Man.
Is it because they are poor? After all, several authors claim that poor folks rebel. Gurr concluded there is no correlation between poverty and rebellion.
Is it because someone came in from outside and stirred 'em up? Gurr concluded, no, that's not it.
So -- WTF is it that causes people to throw it in, say "Fuck it!! I've had enough, I'm gonna throw rocks at the cops!!" ?
Gurr's answer: PERCEIVED RELATIVE DEPRIVATION.
And, WHAT, you ask, is Perceived Relative Deprivation? Basically, it's this: You look around, you see how other people are living, you realize they are living WAY better than you are, then -- and this is the crux of the matter -- you realize there is no way it's getting any better for you. And if you have no hope of things getting better, then, what the hell -- just burn it all down.
When hope is lost, all is lost.
We had the answer to Baltimore and Ferguson and North Charlotte years ago. Our mistake was we thought Gurr's research applied only to little brown people in rice paddies.
It's late. I'm sitting on my deck overlooking the Southern Appalachians and demons from long ago are coming out of the trees.