Wander into the badlands of any large city in the US, shout out “Father” and nothing will stir. Fathers
are rare in this environment; far rarer, shall we say, in the north end of
Hartford than they are in posh New Canaan. What happened to them? Have they all
fled to the West Bank of Paris to become expatriate artists?
The problem is cultural, say most sociologists. Just as F.
Scott Fitzgerald once said of the rich – “They are very different than you and
I” – so is the underclass very different than the Middle Class or the Upper
Class. No one pauses very long to entertain the question: Why are they
different? That is one among many questions assiduously avoided whenever well intentioned
liberals get together with equally well intentioned professors of raceology to
discuss the equally absorbing question: Why can’t we have an honest discussion
on race in America?
Answer: We can’t, among other reasons, because we shy from
answering the all-important question posed two paragraphs above: Who killed Fathers
in the African American community? Indeed, we refuse to acknowledge its
importance. This question cannot be properly probed without mentioning the “U”
word – underclass -- and its connection with households without fathers.
“Poverty” is the polite word most often used by polite liberals
and more earnest progressives to describe the plight of the unmentionable underclass.
And no, people who discuss these things are not racist for having so brashly
mentioned the unmentionable; namely, that there is an underclass under the
noses of most well-intentioned liberals and that this underclass has become a permanent
feature of modern day America.
Poverty in the United States has never been, with some rare
exceptions, permanent; in fact the impermanence of poverty is what has driven
the desperate poor to the United States since its founding. The boast engraved
on the pedestal of the Stature of Liberty -- “Give me your tired, your poor/
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send
these the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door”
– is a celebration of the impermanence of poverty. But an underclass has since
become a permanent fixture of our social order; it is that
very thing the huddled masses were hoping to escape in their desperate flight
to America, where a steady advancement up the ladder of success was impeded by
speedbumps rather than the fortress walls of a class system that in Europe kept
the rich in splendor and the poor in rags, more or less permanently.
It seems ages ago that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York warned us all that the African American family – dad, mom, kids -- was
becoming an endangered species. Part of the problem was – and is – that the
welfare system replaced Dad with a kind of sustenance that imprisoned people
within the system; welfare clients were held in welfare cages on the periphery
of poverty. The more they were helped, the more secure and inescapable their
prisons became. A welfare state that was supposed to allow movement from
temporary dependency to self-sufficiency became a more or less permanent
holding cell, a purgatorium whose doors, unlike the door mentioned in the Emma
Lazarus poem, never opened upon more hopeful vistas.
How many fatherless children are there in our welfare system?
Lots and lots and lots. For the most part, fatherlessness is a precondition for
receiving welfare. And many of the younger “fathers” of children born out of
wedlock – how ancient that word sounds – have never made it to the alter. Some of them are in prison. Brought up without fathers themselves, they drifted –
like ships without rudders, blown here and there by every ill wind. Their
children will drift also, unless they are made of very stern spiritual stuff.
Grandmothers and grandfathers, if they have been lucky
enough to remain together, may help. Ministers, priests, rabbis, imams, social
workers, other siblings and teachers may help. Still, the chance that a young
African American boy whose caretakers have relied on a social welfare system
that strives inadequately to “play father to the child” will be able to navigate around the pitfalls
that lead to gang affiliation, poor marks in school or a prison cell, is considerably
more remote than would be the case if the boy were reared under the watchful
eyes of a self-sufficient, responsible and employed father who would love and
guide him down sure and well-marked paths. Our social welfare system, however
solicitous it may be, has no ethical component to it. And that is what a father
is: an ethicist more loving than a minister, a welfare provider more solicitous
than a welfare system, a defender of his children more fierce and fearsome than
a police chief, a lover of the mother of his children more tender and faithful
than any fling of the moment.
Sons need fathers. And a society that cared for fathers and
sons -- and its own welfare -- would not so perversely ignore the ruin at its
door.
Comments
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The modern democratic state is incapable of love. One might say that it is hostile to love, if one were to simply judge the results of the state's operations. It's inhumanity is manifest in its very architecture. It would be impossible, for example, for the Nutmeg State of Bureaus and Departments to come up with a building as grand, as charming, as lovely as the Capitol. Look at the Leg. Offfice Bldg. next door. Yet, there is precious little doubt that putting our kids in the State's hands for 13 years of "education" is Progress.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized the anti-family, and therefor anti-cultural, effects of welfare back when he worked for Nixon. Yet, when it came to voting for a change Senator Moynihan chickened out while attacking in personal terms Nixon's Silent Majority. Klinton's welfare reform was "boob bait for bubbas."
Welfare is not the only cause of the cultural destruction of the black community. Two other ideas of consequence were the sexual revolution, which asserts that limiting sex to marriage prevents self-fulfillment, and black nationalism, whose manifestations include both grandiose delusions of black achievement and demands for reparations for ongoing victimhood.
Black culture has become merely Anti-. Jesse Jackson said it back at Stanford; heigh-ho Western Civ has got to go. But, there's no suitable replacement for our Constitution and laws, and no replacement at all for Natural Law. White liberals are the main culprits, willing to throw our heritage under the bus to flatter themselves with the idea that they aren't bitter clingers. (But, please, stay out of their school districts.) Those cities with large black populations are particularly barbaric, but barbarism is gradually engulfing the entire country.
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bar·ba·rism
ˈbärbəˌrizəm/
noun
1.
absence of culture and civilization.
"the collapse of civilization and the return to barbarism"
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The NEA's white liberals -- aided by black teachers, politicians and so-called black leaders -- cooperate to ensure that black parents who want their children to have a better education have few viable choices.
Whenever there has been a serious push for school choice, educational vouchers, tuition tax credits or even charter schools, the NEA has fought against it. http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/12/31/liberals-use-of-black-people-n1936579
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Malcolm X argued: "The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses, and decent homes for himself. As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, patronize their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black race's ability to do for itself. That's the only way the American black man is ever going to get respect. One thing the white man never can give the black man is self-respect! The black man never can be become independent and recognized as a human being who is truly equal with other human beings until he has what they have, and until he is doing for himself what others are doing for themselves. The black man in the ghettoes, for instance, has to start self-correcting his own material, moral and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution. The black man in America has to lift up his own sense of values."
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Speaking of cruddy bureaucratic architecture, the monument to MLK in DC. is a hideous classic of Soviet realism.
King is held in high regard because he scolded us in the key of Abraham Lincoln, and because he carried on the tradition of protest previously established by Gandhi of the Inner Temple and Harvard's Thoreau. He is not noted for encouraging civilization, but for using civil disobedience to fight for "equality." Not only is he primarily responsible for the institutionalization of a black culture of protest, but his protest ethos has been adopted by an ever-growing number of alienated groups indigenous to 2015 Estados Unidos.
Malcolm X may not have been an American patriot, but his common sense advice to the black "community" bespoke a respect for natural law. Unfortunately, the "civil rights" movement subsequently has been dominated by criminals and frauds like H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangle and Barack Hussein Obama. They teach us not to live well, but to forever protest, to question authority, to fight against American injustice.
Nor do our colleges and universities teach us to live well, but to be tolerant as hell and wicked open-minded.
I'd like to hear what Malcolm X might have to say about Sex Week at Harvard.
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http://www.hsexweek.org/
“I support sex week because we desperately need to re-examine the way society tells us to value ourselves and to value our bodies. We are worth being comfortable and happy […]Grace Huckins ’16
“I support Sex Week because I can’t stand how it’s socially acceptable for a man to talk about sex and enjoy sex, but if a woman does the same she […]