I don't think 'we' have trouble acknowledging your elephant. Rather, simply pointing at the elephant smashing everything in the room of the Middle East seems u

I don't think 'we' have trouble acknowledging your elephant. Rather, simply pointing at the elephant smashing everything in the room of the Middle East seems unproductive in light of the fact that we have such an elephant in our very own room. Ours just happens to not be smashing things currently. It did do so quite recently though (and rather more violently that ISIS), and not just throughout our entire history, but the history of all of humanity. The elephant is part of human nature. Isn't it much more productive to look at the many underlying factors that might cause elephants to go berserk, both external and internal to the human individual, and then try to find solutions based on that? Increased income equality might be such a factor, or it might not. But at least it acknowledges all the elephants in all the rooms, and offers a possible way out. Pointing at the one elephant somewhere else does no such thing, and is likely to enrage ours (in fact, it already seems rather agitated). Finally, I actually do think that the increasing inequality and centralization of power in the US does significantly increase the chances of a regression to a more 'medieval barbarism state'. It's just not happened yet.