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Monday, August 6, 2007
Leaders’ silence is a dodge that cheats our children
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The great void that exists in the most urgent problem facing the American family, and the black family in particular, is the absence of voices. The silence of leaders, the averted gaze of those who are otherwise judgmental, is the greatest disservice black America does its children.
About 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried parents. Among whites, it’s almost a quarter, among Hispanics, almost half.
The number has grown so large that no politician, nor any black leader dependent on a following, dare speak. So they rally, recycle and re-enact, occasionally pausing to dally in the trivial and the absurd — rushing to the defense of a millionaire athlete indicted in a dogfighting scheme, for example, as both the NAACP and the SCLC are doing. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference had indicated it would “honor” Michael Vick at its national convention but Monday evening said that it would not.
That’s a national convention, mind you, where the litany of black America’s concerns is cataloged for the media, policymakers, opinion leaders and government. “This is not just about Michael Vick, but anyone who might have made mistakes,” SCLC President Charles Steele told the AJC’s Ernie Suggs. “We can’t throw a life away.”
Yet we do.
More than two-thirds of all black children in America are born into a state that virtually guarantees financial and emotional distress long before they are old enough to encounter overt discrimination.
It’s a mystery, in part at least, why so few activists and opinion leaders in the middle class take the risk to confront the obvious. One is that most everybody is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, either because they’ve had a failed marriage or made a mistake in their youth, and in this society hypocrisy is a capital offense. The concern here, though, is not the failed marriage or the youthful indiscretion. It’s the willful act of self-centered adults inflicting harm on children.
The chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears, spoke last month as part of a series of lectures on the family at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, an institution endowed by Lewis Miller, an Ohio inventor and the father-in-law of Thomas Edison. She spoke on the decline of marriage and its consequences for children. She was not talking specifically of black children, but rather of the 36 percent of all children born to unmarried women, as well as the children of divorce and those being raised by a single adult.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I foresee a day when marriage, an historically child-centered relationship, would become almost completely adult-centered, promoting and protecting the freedom of adults to indulge their desires, sometimes to the detriment of the well-being and eventual development of children,” Sears said. “But the numbers, which are staggering, indicate that we are at that point.”
Fatherhood, she noted, “is being pushed even farther into the margins of society.”
“Families, neighborhoods, communities and ethnic groups or social classes in which marriage is common have powerful advantages for children over those in which marriage is no longer the normal paradigm for having and raising children,” Sears said. “To ignore the decline of marriage, therefore, not only puts individual children at risk, it also sets in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of disadvantage. …”
While many single parents work hard and sometimes successfully, children born to unmarried women are found in any number of studies to be at increased risk of poverty, school failure, abuse, delinquency, emotional distress and mental illness. While the absence of a second income may account for half of a child’s lower achievement, most of the remaining disadvantage is due to inadequate parental guidance and attention and weak ties to community resources.
America has put its children on two tracks. One leads to a world where “marriage is the usual and generally reliable framework for raising children,” the other to “communities in which marriage has virtually disappeared as a reasonable and normal precursor to childbearing.”
Two Americas. One programmed at birth to succeed. The other to fail.
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How to spend my billions?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Monday extra. Pick a topic:
• Liberal bloggers attending the second Yearly Kos convention booed Hillary for saying she’d take campaign money from lobbyists. “Yes, I will,” she said. Lobbyists “represent nurses, they represent social workers, they represent, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.” John Edwards and Barack Obama said no. “We don’t want to trade their insiders for ours,” said Edwards. Of course they take money from interests that lobbyists represent. And they take campaign help from unions and other interests — phone banks, for example — that have monetary value to candidates. I’m with Hillary. Put it on the record, in the open, and voters can decide whether a candidate’s bought.
• Among 10th District Congressman Paul Broun’s first votes is one in support of medical marijuana, which he later defended He’s “intensely and unalterably” opposed to recreational drug use and will never vote to legalize it, he said. The amendment he voted on would prohibit the feds from attempting to stop state medical marijuana programs, said Broun. Rocky start here. Better not move the fine china yet.
• Democrats and their media enablers in a snit over Photo ID are as out-of-sync with mainstream Georgia as they are with mainstream America on surrender in Iraq.
• While stands of exotic woods, like those used in finishing the interior of the Performing Arts Centre in Cobb County, should be managed responsibly, they should of course be used to serve mankind’s desires. Aesthetically, a tree that dies in the forest unseen and unpreserved never lived. The forests are not museums.
• Most interesting quote of the weekend, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes from Bill Gross, a billionaire bond king at Pimco, who’s long been known for his liberal politics. Gross writes: “Trust funds for the kids, inheritances for the grandkids, multiple vacation homes, private planes, multi-million dollar birthday bashes and ego-rich donations to local art museums and concert halls are but a few of the ways rich people waste money — and I admit, I am guilty of at least one of these on this admittedly short list of sins. I have, however, avoided the last one. When millions of people are dying from AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum . A $30 million gift for a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”
Better for the rich to spend their money now — ideally on social ills — than to use it to endow foundations that then spend eternity promoting more and bigger government.
