Absent fathers the root of many problems

There's an elephant in the room. No one will admit it's here, right in front of us. Social scientists, policy wonks and politicians walk all around the elephant without ever acknowledging it. They make policies and rules and advocacy organizations to address the symptoms caused by that huge pachyderm that's taking up all the space, but they don't even acknowledge it's there.

The elephant in the room is fathers — the absence of fathers in the lives of millions of children, particularly boys. This absence of fathers is the root cause of many of the social pathologies we see today, particularly in communities with large numbers of fatherless households. The absence of a father can lead to young boys without guidance and discipline. Many of them become angry, violent, disrespectful, depressed and misogynistic. They fail in school and in the workplace. Look at the discipline problems in public schools; you'll find the absence of a father in the home. Look at the school dropout rate; you'll find many in that statistic without a father. Look at the unemployment list — or the unemployable list. Again, no father present.

A few ambitious nonprofits have attempted to provide surrogate fathers, mentors who will work with young men, teach them the importance of being kind and respectful, of working hard in school and staying away from the "wrong crowd." These mentors can demonstrate some successes, but mentors can never fully replace a father — a man who will love the boy's mother and be at home every night, not just a few hours a week.

A Wilson audience learned of a frightening situation that is all too common but, since it's the elephant in the room, is rarely discussed. The Wilson Times reported:  

The keynote speakers at the annual meeting, Ben David and Kip Blakely, spoke from their experience in Wilmington and Greensboro respectively in terms of programs they were a part of implementing to address workforce development.

David, the district attorney in New Hanover and Pender counties, acknowledged the multi-faceted cause of poverty and crime, noting they found only four dads for 253 kids in 87 homes in their target area of Wilmington.

Scary enough for you?

For half a century, the federal government has tried to solve the problems in households headed by single mothers. While some of these brave women manage to be both mother and father to her children, more of these single mothers are too young to make wise decisions about their own lives and cannot offer a successful role model for their children.

If we choose to face the elephant in the room, we should do several things:
  1. Redouble efforts to teach young women good decision making, especially when it comes to having children. Emphasize the marriage-first, babies-later path to a more successful and fulfilling life.
  2. Mentor boys, teach them in school, inspire them in church, but get the message through to them: Real men care for their girlfriends, and that means making their welfare more important than your own. It means avoiding pregnancy by whatever means necessary — abstinence, contraception, fear of failure — until both of you are ready to support and raise children.
  3. Re-emphasize the Protestant Work Ethic. Go back to "idle hands are the devil's workshop;" make sloth and lack of ambition traits to be avoided, not emulated.
  4. Make it clear that school is important, and hard work at school pays better rewards than a shot at a lottery drawing. Many single mothers are dropouts who did not have a good experience in school, and their anti-school attitude gets passed to her children and her grandchildren.

America has a crime problem, an educational problem, an employment problem, a morality problem, a violence problem. But at the bottom of all these problems is a problem in the home, where all of us learn what the world is like, how to treat other people, how to live, how to be responsible adults. Even the best school can't accomplish those goals in a few hours a day, especially if what is taught in school is contradicted at home. What almost nobody is talking about is the elephant in the room: there is no father in the home.

A new era of protests and violence

Twice inside of a week, police officers are ambushed and killed by disgruntled criminals. This is the sort of things that doesn't happen in America or in any civilized, responsive, democratic society. But, suddenly, it is happening here, and there is no reason to believe that similar ambushes won't happen again. The ploy — call 911 to ask for emergency response then gun down the public servants sent to answer the call — conceivably become commonplace. Already, police officers are thinking twice about calls for assistance and are taking precautions against potential traps.

What is different this year from previous incidents of anti-police violence is the ready access to all sorts of military-style weapons, from long, rapid-fire, high capacity guns to explosives. Militant groups or individuals can amass arsenals of deadly weapons the police have difficulty matching.

Although there is little solid evidence to explain what motivated the shooters in Dallas and Baton Rouge, it is widely assumed that these assassinations were staged as payback for the recent deaths of black men in encounters with police. The Baton Rouge ambush occurred only blocks from where Black Lives Matter stage protests almost nightly following the fatal police shooting of a black man in the Louisiana capital.

As any number of saner commentators pointed out, it makes no sense to attack police officers and other law enforcement out of anger over the actions of a single officer in some other place in some other circumstances. For a segment of the population, however, payback is more important than justice, and protest is more important than judicial process. A few individuals turn words of protest into violence.

If America is turning a corner toward total distrust of police and the criminal justice system and toward vigilante actions, chaos and anarchy can be the result. As the Republican National Convention opens this week, I fear for the worst in Cleveland, where concealed carry and open carry of firearms on the streets will make it extremely difficult for law enforcement officers to tell ambush conspirators from Second Amendments stalwarts. Anti-Donald Trump protesters promise disruptions as intense as the 1968 Democratic Convention. Clashes between anti-Trump and pro-Trump factions could easily dissolve into violence.

Distrust of police and criminal justice emanating from the convention protests could usher in waves of violence against police and other pillars of American civilization.

Forty-eight years ago, another divisive election

This is the eve of an election primary day like none I have seen in nearly 50 years. Forty-eight years ago, in 1968, America faced an election that was tearing the nation apart. Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed through more consequential legislation than any president since FDR but who had become a pariah to many voters because of the Vietnam War, chose not to run for a second full term — a decision validated by his death as his successor's term expired.

Johnson's surprise withdrawal from the race, opened the door for challenger Gene McCarthy and, belatedly, for Bobby Kennedy, who was in many ways Johnson's nemesis.

Republicans were trying to recover from the debacle of Barry Goldwater's humiliating defeat in 1964. Richard Nixon, the former vice president and 1960 presidential candidate who couldn't win the California governorship, was the improbable Republican front-runner.

Seething emotions on both sides ripped the fragile fabric of America. An assassin's bullet ended Kennedy's candidacy and crushed the hopes of millions of younger voters. In Chicago that summer, establishment Democrats would align behind Hubert Humphrey, who carried the awful yoke of being Lyndon Johnson's vice president and heir. Riots would disrupt the Democratic Convention, which would adjourn amid seething anger within the party.

Meanwhile, Nixon would campaign not as the anti-communist warrior he had been early in his career but as the candidate who would "bring us together." But his election strategy, which depended upon winning Southern states still rebelling against Johnson's civil rights legislation and the tectonic changes those laws brought to the former Confederacy, made it clear that Nixon's path to election was built on dividing the country into groups that could support him. As president, he would cultivate support from the "Silent Majority" of people angry over war protesters, rising inflation and a too-liberal Supreme Court.

This year, we see the same seething anger and the same divisions of the electorate. We see some of the sort of violence seen outside the Chicago convention hall in the summer of 1968. This year, social media and other communications changes make the anger more mobile and powerful and the demagoguery more persuasive. If anything, the voters of 2016 are more gullible and more easily fooled by slick campaign tactics.

We who remember the election of 1968 don't want to relive it.

In Selma, the violence shocked America

Last weekend, President Obama joined thousands of Americans — elected officials and ordinary neighbors — to commemorate the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," when Alabama state troopers and local law enforcement officers ambushed peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

 All were there to honor the perseverance, the courage, the determination, the principles, the sheer bravery of marchers who were attacked and beaten by frenzied law enforcement officers for the offense of demanding the right to vote in Alabama, a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

That one notoriously violent incident is credited with giving the 1965 Voting Rights Act the impetus it needed to pass Congress. It's no doubt true that without that march, the Voting Rights Act might not have passed, at least not in 1965.

But for all the bravery and determination of those peaceful marchers, it was not they but the other side that deserves credit for making the Voting Rights Act "must pass" legislation. It was the state troopers and local police who made the greatest impression on members of Congress and the American public. Black men and women had tried for decades to win the right to vote in Alabama and other states. Their struggles, though not universally known, were widely reported. Most Americans agreed that it was shameful and un-American to deny upstanding citizens the right to vote.

But most Americans did not know how viciously and sadistically white authorities would defend their contention that African-Americans should never be allowed to vote, regardless of what the Constitution said. They were willing to beat peaceful fellow citizens with baseball bats and truncheons, run over them with mounted police, hit them, drag them, do whatever had to be done, including murder, to stop them from walking to Montgomery and demanding their constitutional right to vote. When Americans saw the reprehensible, inhumane, irrational fury of those white officers, they demanded change. They demanded passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Just as images of fire hoses and police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators had turned America's sentiment in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the images from the Edmund Pettus Bridge turned Congress and America in favor of the Voting Rights Act.

The sadistic men who beat helpless marchers were trying to stop African-Americans from winning the right to vote in Alabama. Instead, they achieved exactly the opposite of what they had wanted. The instigators of hatred and violence against innocent, peaceful people assured the passage of the most sweeping voting legislation since the 15th Amendment 95 years before.