MY AMERICAN ROOTS

I am what has been affectionately been described by my two sons as “an old fart.” I’m a musty dinosaur, an ancient codger, a passé fogey, and a well-worn has-been. In other words, rigor mortis is already setting in my bones and dementia is creeping into every recess of my enormous brain.

Hell, when I was a teen, the major action around town was “draggin’ Main Street.” These days, things have changed just a tad… It’s draggin’ Main Street while doing drive-by shootings. In those days, you looked up to a guy who won a fair fight; nowadays, if you fight fair, you’re a loser. Those in the military who were serving our country were admired. Today, the American Resistance Movement and other similar organizations seeks to send personalized messages to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan calling them murderer’s and fascist pigs.

During a recent trip, I listened to a talk show host discussing two subjects: (1) When did the break down of law and order in this country begin, and (2) Where have our moral standards gone and when did we start to lose them? These are both interesting questions, triggered by recent events.

There is a rising incidence of the use of guns by teenagers during acts of violence. You can blame this on the access to guns if you want but, in the absence of guns these perpetrators of fury will use knives, baseball bats, clubs, rocks or any other object of potential bodily injury other than bare-boned fists. Maybe you could point to Columbine as a decisive turning point? Wherever or whenever it began, this trend poses the worst threat to the civil sanctuary of peace in this country that has ever existed. This course of events comes at a time when law enforcement agencies everywhere are under increased scrutiny and their ability to deal with such situations has been effectively hampered.

Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge for the 9^th District of the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals in San Francisco has come under fire for hosting his own website dedicated to deviant sexual behavior. The site, which featured bestiality and hardcore porn, was discovered while Kozinski was overseeing an obscenity trial, and the Judge has since recused himself. The Judge said he didn’t see anything wrong with having the website and he didn’t consider the pictures to be offensive. Immediately, a throng of people have put forth the argument that the Judge is protected under the “Free Speech” clauses in the Constitution, a position with which I agree. As I see it, the problem here is that the Judge had an obvious propensity for indulging in such material as he was charged with making a Judicial decision over. That should have caused him to recuse himself from the get go.

After having heard the talk show discourse for about an hour, my mind wandered off on the question of whether or not the two questions were related from the standpoint of the breakdown of American society, and I think that they are. That having been said, then when did the breakdown begin?

If you examine the history of humanity and of most mammals who stay together as a family unit, you will find that the male is the dominant head of the household, charged with bringing home the daily bread and protecting the family unit from adversarial forces and events. Among Native Americans, for example, the male was the hunter and the fisherman. He built the living unit, whether it be teepee, wigwam or mud hut. The women looked after the children and together they picked berries and nuts, made rugs and pottery, and did more “domestic” things. In today’s American world, however, we have evolved to having both parents working and behind away from the family unit, which is left to fend for itself without the knowledge or desire to pick berries and weave baskets.

The question is, does the absence of a parenting mother from the nest have an adverse impact on the children that would or could manifest itself in later years in the form of moral decline and anti-social behavior? I think that the mother, (or father, as the case may be), instinctively provides the child with a moral compass and, as the child interacts with peers, the mother provides guidance, comfort and direction in how to get along successfully with others. Where both parents are working, or where the family is a one-parent unit, there is a void in these instructions and the door thusly opens for “inappropriate” activities. After all, the child has to be looking and reaching out for an identity, and there is no one at home to provide support and coaching.

If I am correct, then we could trace the root of the problem back to the era when the American family started to drift into a two-working parent unit and / or when divorce and single-parenting went on the increase. That being the base, I would suggest that the trend began in the early to mid-60’s, that children born of that era would have fewer skills and abilities to cope in the modern world or to be parents themselves, and that their children of the ‘80’s would be even less able to find an identity or to even know what a moral compass is, let alone to follow one. That would make the young men and women of today, now in their early to mid-‘20’s, more aggressive in their social settings and less apt to have defined moral positions.

This has been a rather short discourse on what should be a lengthy and investigative social research project. But, I feel that the assumptions would be proven valid and the conclusions reasonable. I would further suggest that, if we are going to find solutions to rising rates of crime and moral decay, we need to look within the family structures and to find ways to keep a parent home during the critical years of childhood development.

Now, I may be bombarded with accusations of sexism here, but that is not what I said or meant. Someone needs to be at home when the children are at home, and they need to have re-education in the skills of successful parenting; I don’t care if it’s husband or wife. We also need to be willing to sacrifice some material things early in marriage in order to keep household expenses low enough so that only one parent needs to be working.

We need to keep the cheap illegal labor out of our country in order to provide summertime jobs and activities for our young people, so they can learn what real work is and what the real value of a dollar is.

Be it right or be it wrong, that’s MY AMERICAN OPINION, respectfully submitted.