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EDITORIAL: Absent dads spur decline
Jun 21, 2009 (The News Virginian - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
For a glimpse of what ails, tickle a keyboard. A Google search of the term "fatherhood" draws forth predictable players in the dad biz, the National Fatherhood Initiative and Fatherhood at About.com, the former offering statistics demonstrating the importance of fathers and the latter, "your one stop source for information about being a truly great dad." Ward Cleaver wouldn't have bothered clicking and needn't have. But that fictive papa is a caricature of an unsophisticated age. He has vanished and the hip are pleased.
Scroll past the fatherhood groups and the eyes fall on something called "Snoop Dog's Father Hood," which the culturally unaware soon discovers is a reality television show featuring the popular rapper and his family. One episode, according to an online description, shows the star shooting the music video "Sexual Eruption" and later instructing his son on human relations. Presumably, this necessitates watching the video. Yo.
Drift to the news and President Barack Obama, like the sun, also rises. He penned an essay for Parade magazine, urging fathers to stand by their children and families. "I came to understand," says Obama, who grew up fatherless, "that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill." And later: "We need fathers to step up, to realize that their job does not end at conception, that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."
Obama knows that such courage is waning. One in three children, 25 million in all, live apart from their biological fathers, according to census statistics cited by the Fatherhood Initiative. Almost two of three black children grow up like Obama, without fathers. The initiative estimates that absent fathers cost American taxpayers $100 billion annually.
Among sensible people, the effects are not in dispute. Insensibility increasingly prevails. For the past half-century, America has been in a societal freefall. The country's divorce rate is the second highest in the world. That trend has coincided with other ills, such as spiraling crime, illegitimacy, drug use and inner city decay, all bemoaned by academic elites and their media minions but dismissed with sniffs when links are inferred to the devolution of the family and the systematic shedding of that dread thing called morals.
The fathers who founded this country suffered no delusions on this subject. "Our Constitution," said John Adams, "was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." George Washington warned of immorality's perils. "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity," he declared in his farewell address, "religion and morality are indispensable supports."
Understanding this does not translate to fetching Puritans from the ashes. But there must be some preferable locus somewhere in the sea between John Bunyan and Snoop Dog.
Obama, with whom we disagree on most things, recognizes this. Even at the price of something precious, his popularity, Obama frequently has urged black men to seize their responsibility as fathers in hope of reversing the moral pandemic of single parents in the black community. The Rev. Jesse Jackson thinks of this as "talking down to blacks." Obama thinks of this rightly as a push in the opposite direction. Further, he appears to model the message, evidenced by a visibly tender relationship with his two young daughters.
Millions of men of all races, beyond the flashes of cameras, quietly tend to their paternal responsibilities, perhaps today with the slight fanfare of a tie and a cheap card destined to eventually be discarded. They are an imperfect group, but for young men on the precipice of fatherhood, worthy of emulation. America lives in an era when such simple notions have been tossed aside, like those old ties. Society is not better for it.
To see more of The News Virginian or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.newsvirginian.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The News Virginian,
Waynesboro, Va. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For
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