After The Shootings - Look To Culture, Not Politics

[Webster]

OneNewsNow: After The Shootings - Look To Culture, Not Politics

Wednesday, August 7, 2019 | Star Parker - Guest Columnist
http://www.urbancure.org/
--As faith and eternal truths become more marginalized, more young people become isolated and left with a sense of meaninglessness. They lose the key framework through which one takes personal responsibility for his or her life.

The nation must now endure another gut-wrenching tragedy, with 31 having been senselessly gunned downed in Texas and Ohio over a weekend. This following a week where three were gunned down in California.

My appeal is to consider these tragedies a crisis of culture and not to turn them into politics, which is already happening.

I'm thinking about the words of Robert F. Kennedy when he spoke to a crowd in Indianapolis in April 1968, after hearing the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. "In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in," said Kennedy. He himself would be assassinated shortly thereafter.

Kennedy appealed to Americans to move away from "polarization" and "hatred" and toward "love and wisdom and compassion."

It is a great temptation to simplify what is complex, and this tends to mean translating everything into politics, looking for some particular individual to blame and looking for some simple policy answer that will allegedly solve the problem. But these tragedies are not simple and not partisan.

They have occurred too often in our nation and have occurred under Democratic as well as Republican regimes.

There is a sickness in the soul of our nation, and that sickness plays its way through and winds up expressed in deadly, pathological acts of lonely, lost, confused individuals -- disproportionately, young males.

We must try to grasp the nature of this pathology and consider how it may be addressed. If we look, we can see other telling symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the rate of suicide in the nation is the highest since 1942. From 1999 to 2017, the suicide rate increased 33 percent, and in 2016, suicide was the second leading cause of death in the age range of 10 to 34.

The rate of suicide among young men is more than three times higher than that of young women.

On the other side of the spectrum, while young Americans are taking their own lives at an increasing rate, fewer are bringing new life into the world.

The CDC reports that in 2018, for the fourth year in a row, the nation's fertility rate -- the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 -- dropped and hit a historic low. And this has occurred coincidentally with a drop in the rate of marriage. The percentage of American adults who are married is one-third less than where it stood half a century ago.

Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has written about the huge exit of prime-age males -- 25 to 54 -- from the workforce. In 1965, according to Eberstadt, 96.6 percent of prime-age males were working. Now its 88.5 percent, meaning millions of prime-age males have abandoned the workforce.

All this has occurred as Christianity, once a pillar of American society, has been pushed to the margins. Per Gallup, in 1974, 65 percent of Americans expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the church or organized religion. By 2019, this was down to 36 percent.

Faith builds a sense of belonging to something true and greater than oneself. It provides meaning and an anchor in times of difficulty and uncertainly.

As faith and eternal truths become more marginalized, more young people, particularly young males, become isolated and left with a sense of meaninglessness. They lose the key framework through which one takes personal responsibility for his or her life.

It produces an inclination to look for others to blame for their difficulties, for their personal struggles. Sometimes it becomes violent.

There is a great price to be paid for a culture of meaninglessness.

This is what we should be thinking and talking about, rather than simple political answers and who to blame.

 

[tango]

Many good points here but I think it also needs to be said that political considerations underpin at least some of the observations here.

It might be worth asking why young people aren't getting married and having children. It seems to me that, for young men in particular, marriage looks very much like a contract in which you give up everything in exchange for potentially nothing. If divorce courts overwhelming favor the mother when it comes to things like custody of children, alimony, retention of assets etc, it's easy to see why young men would be more reluctant to enter into such an arrangement. This is the sort of thing that isn't just driven by some concept of "culture".

Likewise policies relating to things like affirmative action will, sooner or later, leave young white men feeling more and more alienated. It's good to combat genuine racism but when regulations give the impression that whitey gets sidelined every which way as companies hire a lesser qualified black candidate because they need more black faces, what is a young white guy trying to get into work supposed to think? You can bring a lawsuit to allege discrimination if you are female, nonwhite, gay, transgender, disabled etc, but if you're a straight white man you're out of luck. This, too, is largely driven by politics.

The flip side to the issue of young white men is the issue of young black men growing up in the inner city without a father figure. If nobody, not even your mother, even knows who your daddy is then where do you find a male role model as you try to navigate your teenage years? Chances are you're going to look to a strong local man, but if that strong local man is the gang leader or a drug dealer you're going off the rails and fast. And if you're in a place where the mistakes you make as a teenager land you in trouble with the law even if you didn't cause any harm to anyone (for example the problem of legal consequences for something as simple as possession of marijuana), chances are your career prospects just went from poor to almost non-existent. Best get used to asking "do you want fries with that?". Or you can make some more meaningful money by selling drugs. Should we be surprised that people decide to sell drugs and live it large, if the option is flipping burgers for minimum wage when you don't know from one day to the next what your schedule might be, and your boss is at liberty to just cut your hours without notice? Here, too, breaking the generational cycles of despair and futility is at least partly a political matter.

The article you quoted makes many good points - many problems like this need to be addressed as individual matters rather than people falling into party lines, with one side insisting the answer is to endlessly throw money at the problem and the other side insisting the answer is to just cut everything loose and let it work itself out. Was it John F Kennedy who said we should look not for the Democratic solution or the Republican solution but the best solution? As the nation gets more and more polarised it seems the middle ground holds more and more of the answers.