Area: Metaphysical
  Date: 08-09-93  07:36
  From: Chuck Haynes
    To: All
  Subj: Broken Homes & Violence

Original in  : AEN_NEWS Echo
Original from: NEIL SCHULMAN
Original to  : ALL
Original date:  8 Aug 93,  10:27

 The following article is under submission.  Reproduction
 on computer bulletin boards is permitted for informational
 purposes only.  Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman.
 All other rights reserved.



             THE REAL CAUSE OF VIOLENCE IN AMERICA?

                     by J. Neil Schulman


     We live in a violent society -- there's no getting away from
that simple fact.  But what's the cause?  Everybody has their pet
scapegoat to blame for it.  Some people blame the availability of
guns, particularly among teenagers.  Others blame the portrayal
of violence on television.  Still others blame the fact that kids
play video games rather than reading books.

     I think the criminal use of guns, and TV violence, and
the trivialization of our culture are all effects of deeper
causes.  And I think one of those deeper causes is that one third
of American families with children are either single-parent or
can't pay their bills unless both parents work.

     I was born in 1953.  When I was growing up, I lived in a
typical middle-class American family.  My father went to work at
a job that brought in money and my mother worked at home by
taking care of my father, my older sister, and me.  This
combination worked out well.  My mother taught me how to read
long enough before I got to kindergarten that none of us can
remember precisely how young I learned.  Because taking care of
the home was a full-time job for my mother, she always knew
where my sister and I were and what we were doing, and whether we
should be doing it or not.  You can argue the feminist point that
maybe it didn't always have to be the mommy who stayed at home
and the daddy who went somewhere else to work, but it's hard to
argue against the proposition that at least \one\ of the parents
should have as his or her primary job raising their kids.

     In 1960, my father got a new job that moved the family from
a three-bedroom attached house in Forest Hills, New York, to a
brand-new house in Natick, Massachusetts -- a bedroom community
for Boston.  The house had four bedrooms, an unfurnished
basement converted into a family room after a couple of years,
sat on an acre of wooded land, and cost $24,000.  My
father's starting salary at his new job was $18,000 a year.  You
can look at it that my father had to work 16 months to earn
enough money to buy the house for cash.  Of course that's not how
he did it -- the cost of the house was spread over a thirty-year-
mortgage -- but that gives you a good idea of the ratio between
earning power and house payments at the time.

     The same job my father started at $18,000 a year today
has a starting salary of about $45,000.  But the equivalent house
on the same acre of land today costs around $250,000 -- and it
was up to $350,000 until the real-estate market collapsed a few
years ago.

     Today, the person holding my father's job would have to work
67 months -- over four times as long -- to earn the cash needed
to buy the same house my parents raised me in.  The fixed mortgage
rate today is also about twice as high as the 4% interest rate my
parents had on that house -- and it was \not\ a government
subsidized rate.

     Other unavoidable costs have risen even faster.  Medical and
automobile insurance have skyrocketed, making insurance payments
one of the largest yearly family outlays.  Workers accept pay
cuts to prevent their companies from going into bankruptcy or
overseas, while prices for groceries continue upward.

     Mommies and daddies today work full-time jobs outside the
home and manage a full-time job inside the home as well.  Even
that's not enough to make up the difference -- today's "home" is
more likely a 1000-square-foot apartment rather than a 2400-
square-foot house.  Because there's no longer any real
possibility of division of labor in the household -- and because
families are living in smaller quarters than they used to --
families are buckling under the pressure: the national divorce
rate is now around fifty percent.  Why \not\ get divorced,
since the pressures of living as a family are often no longer
outbalanced by the satisfactions of home life?

     So too many kids are raised in what used to be called
broken homes -- raised by babysitters, teachers in overcrowded
classrooms, and by soulless electronic diversions.

     Then we wonder why our kids take pot shots out of car
windows at other kids.  Why not?   Mommy or Daddy were too busy
keeping a roof over their heads to drill into their little
skulls that shooting at people is wrong.

     All of the above is a best-case scenario.  Many of us can't
even find the jobs necessary to keep body and soul together, and
either get lost among the homeless, or in anesthetic drugs such
as alcohol or cocaine.

     Of course as good a case can be made that it's possible for
parents to raise children properly if there are other relatives
close by or if neighbors help each other out.  But the same economy
that makes two-worker marriages break up also makes us chase
across a continent after good jobs, scattering families and
trivializing our friendships.

     You can argue that there are other causes for families
breaking up.  But there's little denying the role that
economics plays in shaping social institutions.  Because we're
poorer than our parents' generation, our primary social
institution -- the family -- is unable to do its job often
enough that too many children are growing into violent criminals
instead of civilized adults.

     We used to live in a country where the main product of our
economy was hope for a better future.  Our parents worked
hard in the expectation that it would make their children's lives
better than theirs.  Instead, it's worse.  Where did all their
money go?

     That's easy.  When you break down the economic burden on
each family in taxes, inflation, hidden regulatory costs,
higher interest rates, and lost industries due to money being
spent on servicing the national debt rather than building new
industries, my estimate is that it comes in at close to the
same amount as the net income brought in by a second working
parent: about $10,000 a year.

     If the cost of excess government is contributing to the
destruction of our civilization itself, what's it worth to buy
our country back from the politicians and lobbyists who are
spending our family's house money?

     Is it worth our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor?
One way or another, that's what we're paying anyway.


                             ##

     J. Neil Schulman's 1979 novel \Alongside Night\ predicted
many of our current economic ills, and won the Prometheus
Hall of Fame Award in 1988.  He lives in Los Angeles.

  OLX 2.1 TD  Stop Crime: Arm the Victims!


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