Chapter 11: Patching Up the Wounded

(This is chapter 11 of "Up and Out," a book condensing my long experience about how to best help poor people.  I pledged earlier to get it up online as soon as possible, so it would be available for free to everyone trying to cope with helping the Katrina evacuees.)

(These are not things that need to be done during the first part of this emergency.  Rather, this is for the time after that, when Katrina evacuees will be moving from getting immediate emergency assistance to trying to normalize their lives.  That is when good programs to help them "up and out" of their situation need to kick in.  The following is for that time.)

(For other chapters, look under "Categories" at the left, and click on the chapter you want.)

"UP AND OUT: A GUIDE TO TRUE COMPASSION FOR THE POOR"

PART I: THE AMERICAN POVERTY TRAP

Chapter 11: Patching Up the Wounded

At the end of the analysis, most poverty in America is the beggar offspring of the Sexual Revolution.  With unremitting proselytizing, the huge and dominant Boomer generation has planted the seeds of the Sexual Revolution deep into the soil of the mainstream culture.  Widespread fatherlessness is what grew from those seeds.  Most poverty, and most violent crime, is the sour and bitter fruit.

Who will be the ones to change it?  If it is to happen at all, the Boomers are best positioned to do it.  If they do not, it falls on their children and the surviving oldsters.

The Greatest Generation, long since retired, is entering the ranks of the elderly.  Their time for helping us is growing shorter. 

The "Silent Generation" - those who grew up in the Great Depression and WWII and fought the Korean War - have already retired.  They will soon be the last generation with a good first-hand memory, not only of strong families and marriages, low crime rates and excellent education, but also of what good child rearing looks like.  Relatively few who grew up later have ever seen good child rearing, or the very different results it brings in children, schools, education and the entire culture.  The Silent Generation can help some, but their high-energy, strongest years are behind them.

That leaves the Boomers, for the most part, and those younger.

Can the Boomers reverse the cultural revolution?  They certainly could.  Those of us who taught them in colleges and universities in the 1960s - even those of us who tried to radicalize them further - also gave them the intellectual tools needed to uncover and correct a mistaken course.

We taught them about staying ready to change their minds.  They were taught to follow the evidence wherever it led, the importance of accepting it even when unpalatable, the supremacy of fact over theory, and the necessity of changing theories to fit the facts, not the other way around.

True, many Boomer academics have tried to undermine these very precepts.  But they have not disappeared nor stopped working.  They can help resourceful Boomers use the evidence we have now as feedback to correct the course taken by an entire generation.

Have Boomers, like every generation before them, been resistant to changing their minds?  Yes, of course.  Still, many of us who once agreed with their world view, who even taught it to them, have since changed our minds as the situation changed.  They are no less able to do that.  Along with the grand ideas we gave them in college - many of which have proved so tragically toxic - they also got the tools necessary to examine and re-examine them.  Now is the time to use those tools.  A critical eye is what is needed now.

In the fairly recent past, some generations have embraced and treasured the bedrock values.  One was the Civil War generation, as shown hauntingly in letters written by the soldiers.  One was the Victorian generation in England, which happened because of a determined effort by some of their finest and best. 

The disaster of the Great Depression of the 1930s turned the hearts of that generation from the unhibited values of the "Roaring Twenties" to the bedrock values.  Then, after risking their lives in WWII, the Greatest Generation also realized they wanted nothing more than those values.  Now there is a desperate need for the Boomer Generation to rise to the same kind of challenge.

Today, we seem not to be faced with any disaster huge enough to strip away the fluff and make us yearn for the bedrock underneath.  Yet we are, in actual fact, living through a terrible disaster.  It is what has happened to our poor, our children and our freedom from crime and fear.  It is also what has become the "new normal."

If a foreign enemy had done this to us, we would recognize it more easily as the disaster it is.  But since so many of us have been complicit in it, we are less likely to see it that way.

The Boomer generation has been heavily criticized in these pages, all but called "The Bad Generation."  It has in fact been criticized by many as distinctively self-indulgent, self-preoccupied, oddly un-grown-up and dismissive of other generations and their values.  Yet it showed wonderful idealism in the 1960s, before it turned to drugs, sex and "me."

Granted all that, the fact remains that we owe the Boomers.  There is a huge area where we will always be in their debt.  And that has to do with race.

True, it was not the Boomers who made the biggest advances in the fair and equal treatment of the races.  That came just before they arrived in strength on the scene.  From the 1950s progress in beginning the integration of education to the pre-1964 progress in integrating lunch counters, buses and all of the public square, it was the legal battles and movements led by the black members of the Greatest Generation and Korean-War Silent Generation, with some dedicated whites from those generations, together with many courageous young blacks as troups, that waged and won the most crucial civil rights battles, mostly before 1964. 

It was also the policital brilliance and genius of President Lyndon Johnson, seizing the moment in early 1964 when the nation was wracked with grief over the assassination of President Kennedy, to push through all the civil rights legislation introduced by Kennedy and blocked until then by a resistant Congress.  That also was before the Boomers hit their stride.

Even when Mario Savio started the Boomers off with the "Free Speech Movement" from Berkeley in 1964, attacking the "military-industrial complex" by crying out in Sproule Square, "Put your hands in the gears and throw your bodies on the wheels!  Stop them!" that was still the infancy of the real movement.

But what the Boomers did do, when they began arriving in force on campus about then, and later when they reached positions of influence and power, was to hammer deep into the culture, over and over and on and on, the fundamental insistence that "all races are equal and racial discrimination is evil." 

It is mostly their doing that racial tolerance is now part of the very bones of the belief system of this culture.  It is the Boomers' major triumph, their finest contribution to their country.

When the record of these times is written, it may be said that, just as the price for delivering our nation from the evil of slavery was some half a million deaths in the Civil War; just so, the price we paid for ridding ourselves of a century of legal segregation and Jim Crow laws and denial of basic civil rights to black people, was the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.  Both of these were terrible prices.  But the evil that was overcome in both cases was too awful to be permitted to continue.  The price was horrific, but necessary (in my view) if that was what it took.

The difference is that the half million lives lost in the Civil War could not be recovered.  But we still have a chance to reverse the Cultural Revolution, recover our bedrock values, and restore much of what was lost.

That restoration is precisely what is needed most to prevent the largest part, not only of poverty in America, but also of violent crime.  For that to happen, our massive fatherlessness needs to be cut back to at least its pre-1960s level.

Where should we begin to reverse the trend toward more and more fatherlessness?  That will require the restoration of traditional family values.  These values are: early and near-universal marriage; sex only inside marriage; faithful marriages; throttling back the divorce rate; and the cherishing of all children.

It will also be crucial to restore the old norms to accomplish, as all healthy cultures do, the thorough socializing of young males.  That is how their energy and aggressiveness has always been turned from self-aggrandizement toward the service of their own marriages, children and their country.

Part of that socialization means taking strong measures to discourage any sex before marriage.  That is how societies have always driven young men toward early marriage, rather than allowing them to follow any bent toward sexually exploiting and discarding young women, together with their offspring.

The perenial problem of all cultures in properly socializing their young men was acknowledged by the crude old folk saying, "Why buy a cow if you can get free milk?"  No free milk meant more people would get their own cows and care for them.  And no free sex meant young men would marry early, stay married, and support their wives and children.

It also meant that young men, by having to delay sex until marriage, courted young women rather than seducing them.  (That was also because young men who seduced were punished severly by the brothers and fathers of the young women, and by all of the society.)  Courting made for a very different relationship between the sexes, now almost forgotten, but badly needed.

Postponing sex until marriage also meant most men and women did not produce fatherless children!

It also meant a young man was expected to prove to a young woman's parents, before marrying, that he could support a family.  For instance, it was once the expectation that he would have a house before he married, so that he and his bride would have someplace to live and raise children.

Then, as now, young men had to compete with other young men for the hand of desirable young women.  In that setting, some tried to out-promise each other.  Some tried to out-prosper each other.  And all tried to show what fine husbands they would be.  In comparison to present dating customs, there may be a lot to be said for that kind of system for promoting better marriages.  Young women today agree that it is almost impossible to find a young man who is willing to make a commitment!

So the former "conspiracy of society" to deny unmarried sex to men not only promoted marriage and avoided most fatherlessness, but also promoted the general prosperity.  Young men became productive, did so early, and continued to produce, prompted in large part by the socially-enforced requirement of marriage before sex. 

Did all this harm the young men?  How could it when married men statistically are happier, healthier and live longer?  When, statistically, married men even have better sex?

The old "conspiracy among women" also needs to be resurrected.  Feminists somehow missed the meaning of real sisterhood among women.  True sisterhood means women uniting to deny sex to young men unless they marry them first!  It also means reinstating the shunning and disrespect formerly suffered by women who "broke the rules" in order to compete better against other women for a good husband.

Women again need to look on such cheating as being, not only unfair, but unacceptable.  The rest of society - moms and dads, the media and the rest - need to back up the social sanctioning of women, and men, who break these rules.

Secondarily, there are also some other values that need strengthening.  For instance, we need to structure public policies and laws so as to lead to rewards for "playing by the rules," and sanctions for not doing so.  Using the principle of "multiple reinforcement," different parts of society all need to send the same message: "Play by the rules!"

The basic rules are: "graduate from high school, go to work, get married, be a good spouse, a good parent and a good citizen."  Next to these in importance are: "Don't have sex before marriage, stay married, don't break the law, don't cheat on your spouse or try to steal someone else's."  These also are pretty basic.  If we encourage these and socially enforce them - and stay vigilant not to weaken them with well-intentioned but bad laws and programs - things should get a lot better, and fairly quickly.

Other values whose strengthening would help are those of honesty, hard work, delayed gratification (not only sexual, but financial and even of partying!) saving for emergencies, home purchases, college and retirement; truthfulness, reliability, patriotism, protection of women and children, goodness, kindness, charity, concern for other people - all summed up in the final one, good character.  A wise society would see to it that these are valued and admired more than flash, talent, style, glamour, riches and fame.  A wise society would labor hard to build good character in its people. 

Other secondary values, especially in helping poor people move up, are those listed in a later chapter in this book, in areas where they can really profit: good work habits, more education and training, good parenting, good money management, better time management, and better housekeeping and sanitation.

Both the primary and secondary values need to be worked on at two levels, in order to patch up the lives of the poor:

One level is patching up the casualties of the culture war.  This involves mainly our poor and our children.  It also means trying to turn around those whose contribution to society is negative or harmful, including alcoholics, addicts, criminals and the able-bodied who refuse to work to support themselves.

Such patching-up is best done one by one, hands-on and long-term.  It requires all we can muster of help by faith-based and other charities, as described in earlier and later chapters.  There is a great need for many more such charities, for volunteers and workers, and for funding. 

Even so, the work of patching up the casualties of the culture war amounts to mere "fingers in the dike."  The next chapter addresses the major task.