Chapter 12: Ending the War Against the Poor
(This is chapter 12 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 12: Ending the War Against the Poor
Patching up the poor is to repair damage already done. What is needed is to prevent future damage: to end what amounts to "A War Against the Poor." That requires changing the mainstream culture. Specifically, it will mean de-sexualizing the mainline culture more and more, until the high levels of open sexuality in the culture are scaled back to more traditional, much lower levels.
What this must never mean is fostering any idea that all sex is bad. Rather, it should differientiate, from society's point of view, between "good" and "bad" sex.
"Good" sex would be the sex in marriage (which, incidentally, has been shown by multiple studies, actually to be better than non-married sex.) That is the kind of sex that causes couples to bond to each other, that glues marriages together and helps them last, that intensifies married love and satisfies very profound human needs.
That is also the kind of sex that produces children who possess both fathers and mothers and all that means, not only for their not being poor or criminal, but also for simply being normal.
That is the kind of sex that gives children two parents in the house: that gives them both male and female models of adulthood, both male and female styles of discipline and child rearing and cherishing and loving, both male and female examples of complementary strengths and weaknesses.
Sons will unconsciously look for wives who embody what is best in their mothers. Daughters will also unknowingly look for husbands who can measure up to the standard set by their fathers. This is one of the irreplaceable functions performed by both parents. Having both parents will help the children choose their own spouses more wisely. The children will also be more likely to have healthy and happy marriages of their own.
While sons and daughters look unconsciously to the parent of the opposite sex as models for choosing their future spouses, they look to the parent of the same sex as a role model for their own behavior. A son looks to the father and a daughter looks to the mother. Both sons and dauthers, then, do best with both a mother and a father.
When there is no father, a daughter has no model of what kind of a man of her own to look for. She has no experience of a man who thinks she is precious and tries to protect and provide for her. Then she typically may yearn for such a man and to look for him frantically in all the wrong places, going from man to man.
The fatherless son also has no good model of what kind of man he should try to be. When it is time for him to break free psychologically from his mother, as he must for his own development, there is no one else for him to turn to. His mother is not the role model he needs at that point in his life.
The son may end up not really liking women, sometimes even being hateful and abusive toward them. He has no experience of watching a man cherish, support and protect his wife and children. He has little idea of what a good father is like, or a good husband, or how to be one himself. He may well have no desire to be either.
For children, there is no good substitute for having both a father and a mother. "Good" sex is the kind that is most likely to bring that about.
Very briefly, "bad" sex would be any kind of sex that is not "good" sex (still speaking from society's viewpoint.) So all casual sex, all pre-marital sex, all sex that is unfaithful to a marriage partner, all sex outside marriage, would be "bad" sex. Only married sex is "good" sex.
"Bad" sex would also be any kind of sex that undermines "good" sex. It is any kind of sex that leads or tempts people away from "good" sex. It would include sexually-charged material or situations that would tend to lead people away from "good" sex into "bad" sex.
For all these reasons, pornography needs the most serious attention. It has always been around, of course. But until fairly recently, there was little of it, it was mostly underground, poorly done and not easy to find. Now it is available to anyone, anytime, almost anywhere.
In its net effect, pornography is not good for satisfying and enduring relations between men and women. It sets standards of sexual prowess and physical desirability that are almost impossible for most men or women to compete with. It can make people dissatisfied with their spouses. It has ruined many marriages. Apparently it can also become addictive, with all the distortions an addiction causes in lives and relationships.
Worst of all is when pornography involves children or physical abuse or violence. These incite many to abuse children and adults, and toward violence in sex. Pronography has little to recommend it; it is almost an unmitigated evil. We could actually get along without it. But now it permeates our culture to a much larger extent than ever before, more than we realize.
In fact, the pornography business has grown so huge that it generates more income than the largest corporations! With so much money involved, it will be incredibly difficult to bring under control.[1] It can be expected that the strongest counter-attacks by the pornography industry will paint any who oppose it as icy prudes who hate sex in any form.
But control it we must. The public square is full of it, at news stands or any electrical outlet. It must be driven back underground and protested, hounded, harried, starved and persecuted. Communities need to drive it outside their city limits again, as they did until fairly recently.
Laws are needed, not to make it illegal, but to control and suppress it. There is no need to make it illegal to possess it, only to make it commercially, sell it, rent it, or send it through the mail, TV, or internet. Anything less would probably not be enough, considering not only its huge financial resources, but also its inherent fascination and attraction.
Even aside from frank pornography, we now have a public square filled with constant sexual incitement and titillation. Styles are now intended to invite, not so much love or admiration as purely sexual attraction and arousal. Current fashions have even very young girls dressed in ways that only prostitutes dressed not so very long ago. Movies, books, TV and DVDs are filled with scenes of unmarried sex, explicit sex, nudity and near-nudity. Language has become filled with coarse, even disrespectful or abusive, terms for sexual matters.
With so much about sex everywhere, our children are heavily impacted. Pre-puberty, children may have some interest in sex, but are sexually "latent." They are supposed to be. Childhood is a serious matter. It needs to be completed before the next stage comes. Being a child needs the full attention of children. They should not be involved in sexual issues until later. And they should not be assaulted by sexual material on every side.
Even during puberty, teens should not be swamped with sexual images. If they become sexually active, it hurts their school performance, as documented earlier. If their relations become sexualized, rejection and jealousy are likely to be considerably more intense than when no sex is involved. Disturbances in schools may well be made worse by the intense feelings that go with being sexually active. Even adults do not handle sexual rejection or jealousy very well. Teens do even worse. They are on an emotional roller-coaster already; they do not need to have that intensified.
Even more important, having sexual incitement all around them in the culture helps spur teens into unmarried sex. Their new, strong sexual urges need cooling and restraint, not incitement. That fire needs to be contained, not to have gasoline poured on it! A sex-filled culture is especially destructive for teens. In fact, a sex-filled culture is one of the worst things that can happen, to all of society.
There will always be people with motives for pushing more sex into the culture. There will be some, for instance, who just want to be surrounded by as much sex as possible, all over the culture, regardless of how that may impact anyone else.
Some will be advertisers, because it is true that "sex sells products." Some will be gambling casinos or bars that use sex-charged entertainment to pull in customers.
Still others will be out to profit by selling "bad" sex for money: pornography, adult movies and videos and internet and bookstores, "gentlemen's clubs," and prostitution. These purveyors include the worst of national and international criminal mobs operating in this country, which make incredible profits from running such sex industries here. They no doubt will be formidable opponents.
Still, thankfully, sex will always be there. It is necessary, vital and marvelous. Nothing else can really compare to its attraction, its power and fulfillment. We do not need a culture without sex!
The important thing now, however, is to set some limits, to turn down the volume, to establish some effective controls on how bad and how much can enter the public square. There have to be possibilities that can protect individual freedoms, yet still protect society from the fatherlessness, with all its horrific results, that a sex-saturated society has brought us.
Our society is severely out of balance. Individual needs and desires have far outbalanced the needs of families, children, the poor and all of society. A better balance needs to be restored. For that to happen, the needs of families, chidren and the poor need to weigh more than they do now, and individual needs and desires need to weigh somewhat less again.
In such a time as this, a more traditional balance is urgently needed to push back widespread fatherlessness. It has devastated, not only the poor, but also so much that we hold dear.
We are already at the crossroads. The enormous disaster is still spreading. We do not have the incentive of an obvious, more visible national disaster such as the Great Depression or WWII generations had, so obvious that an entire generation would turn to the bedrock values.
Instead, we have an almost silent disaster, rumbling faintly far beneath our feet, quietly corroding and cracking and crumbling the underlying bedrock into sand. Soon we may be standing only on shifting sand, unsteady on our feet as the consequences of what we have done flood higher and higher around us.
Until that silent disaster is exposed to light, and faced and fought, the silent crumbling will go on. We cannot afford to ignore it any longer. We dare not wait until the foundations are totally gone.
Since the disaster itself is not mobilizing us, the examples of the Great Depression and WWII do not fit this situation. Rather, the time just before the Victorian period is more like ours. The way the Victorians turned it around is the example that fits our situation better.
As in their case, our turn back to bedrock values will have to be driven by sheer force of will. As with them, it will have to spring from those among us who are willing to pull together the great, perservering, punishing, dogged effort it will take.
Those who join that struggle need to understand that they can expect, not praise, but fierce opposition, ridicule and abuse. They are hardly likely, at this time, to be considered the finest and best among us. They are unlikely to be considered as heroes in their time. But hopefully, at some point in the future, we will come to understand that is who they were. Whoever they will be, the nation will be lastingly in their debt.
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[1] According to The Washington Times, more than $11 billion a year.
