Two Questions - Continued (part 3, conclusion)

What Happens When the Basic Building Block is destroyed?

What is happening to the building block?

Over the past 100 years, we’ve moved incrementally away from the historical model of a family.  First, we’ve removed the extended family, then we weakened the historical ties, then we questioned the value of life, and now we argue the family itself is corrupt and out of date.  So, what can possibly go wrong?

Historically, when a child reached adulthood and started their own family they moved out, but not far away.  Today, thanks to modern transportation we routinely migrate hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles away from the parents as we start our new lives.  This migration has always been a part of the American experience, but today we see it on a much larger scale than the past.  We’ve become a nation on the move where those who can afford to – never seem to find a place of permanence.  

Grandparents and cousins are pictures on the wall, not routine visitors and playmates.  Gatherings at the holidays will find some excluded for any of a hundred reasons.  The extended family’s ability to help raise and shape the child in the values of the society is often lost in the mobility of today’s world.

Today we see the erosion of the historical values of society as the newer generations become an adult with values derived from external sources like school and television.  Here the values of the family core are displaced by the values of the writers in the entertainment industry or in the philosophies of the educators.   We’ve left the shaping of the child to those who have no direct interest in his or her success or failure.

I believe the result is a child goes through their development with an incomplete picture of society, how they fit within it, and what are the reasonable moral values of a society that will prosper and grow.  They have become individuals who are focused on remaining individuals and not part of the greater family group.

What happens when the family group disappears?

History tells us the society will end.