Maybe it never was all right. Or maybe it's worse now. But the gap between the rich and poor in both the circumstances of living and the level of civility is widening. And the two may be related.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

It is hard for a media person to see. We are employed, paid a living if not excessive wage and have enough education and thus information at hand not to feel helpless in 2007 America. If we are in a bad economic situation we are well enough informed to know that our situation is, at least in part, of our own making.

But what about the others? There are still enough remnants remaining of the so-called Protestant ethic at the core of American society for some to say that if people are in trouble, it is because they deserve to be in trouble. The absolutely feckless way that some people -- even employed people -- get themselves mired in debt beyond their ability ever to dig themselves out serves as illustration.

Many Americans have tons of credit-card debt. The banks, airlines and almost every other American business entity that markets anything offer people credit cards with no idea whether they can handle more debt or not. When people accept the cards and run up too much debt, that's because they are stupid -- or worse, sick, unable to resist the mindless pitches of America's salespersons. But then what?

Now it's mortgages. Talk with someone in the real estate business and you will see that they basically have no feelings about the fact that the number of foreclosures is rising brutally. Subprime mortgages -- offered to people who can't afford to pay them back just to move houses or apartments off the market -- are now trashing people's lives in ever-increasing numbers.

Because the American economy is so leveraged, no one in a position of power has to care who gets annihilated. The lender has bundled and sold the mortgage to some company in South Carolina that doesn't care, having written off the mortgage as a bad debt and having reclaimed the property through foreclosure. Ask what happens to the person evicted from the property. Who knows? He has to rent now. It's his own fault anyway for having taken out the mortgage without having paid attention to the terms.

Fine, but what happened to the American dream of homeownership? Some among the well-to-do cleaned up on the deal -- the builder, the seller, the lender, the forecloser, the evictor or maybe all of these. But the person whose belongings are put out on the street, with whatever he put into the property lost? How does he feel?

Those of us who read and follow economic news are told all sorts of cheery things to keep us from thinking about those on the raw end of the deals that, collectively, keep us on top of the heap.

The stock market is hitting new highs. We are supposed to rejoice if we hold stock. Or, we are supposed to put that news against what otherwise might worry us seriously. Examples in that latter category include a balance of trade that is highly unfavorable to the United States, big budget deficits through 2010 and beyond, and a national debt approaching $9 trillion that will never be paid off.

We might ask ourselves how it is that the stock of company "X" continues to rise in price: What is that company doing, exactly, that makes its stock worth more and more? The answer is that it probably is benefiting from being manipulated by traders, or that we, collectively, are looking at a much higher rate of inflation than the numbers say. There are a lot of ways to measure the rate of inflation. One is the core Consumer Price Index. It doesn't include food or energy -- in other words, the prices you pay at the supermarket or gas station, where gas has passed $3 a gallon and is galloping toward $4 like a hungry greyhound.

Another element in assessing the state of the overall economy is the unemployment rate and, perhaps even more important, the rate at which the economy is creating new jobs. Not only has the economy's record in that regard been abysmal since 2000, one cannot even have much confidence in what we are told about it.

The real unemployment figure would have to take into account people who have simply stopped looking for work or are working outside the recorded economy. As for the dubious job-creation rate, the economy has to generate an average of 150,000 new jobs each month just to accommodate new workers entering the economy. In April, it added a miserable 88,000.

Again, thinking of the ordinary person, not the super rich, there is the awful issue of health care. America has some 47 million people with no health insurance. A recent study showed America as 37th of 191 countries in terms of quality of health care, even though we were tops in health-care spending. Worse, we were 51st in fairness of health care. That's the access piece, the place where the rich are separated from the poor in terms of access to quality care.

On the negative "measuring civility" side, we see methamphetamine and other drug abuse, identity theft, home "invasions," the burning of churches, petty and grand thievery, extreme religiosity, gambling and child and elderly abuse that defies belief. Some of it looks like urban Victorian England. But so do our rich resemble the lords of those days in their economic distance from the poor.

Is there a connection? As the West Side Story gang "The Jets" told Officer Krupke, are they depraved because they are deprived? Who knows.

America is probably revolution-proof, no matter what anyone does to the poor. And it has been made more revolution-proof by post-9/11 security measures.