Failure of Family

By Rev. Amari Magdalena          

“It takes a village to raise a child;” a saying never truer than its very need today.  I’m watching families around me succumb to the maladies of the 20^th and 21^st century’s vision of nuclear family.  And, the concept is failing miserably.  Every day we are exposed to media stories of domestic violence, child abuse, and filicide.  I don’t know about you, but I’m wondering how on earth we got here?

What I see magnified here in my visit to Southern California is clarifying my feelings.  The nuclear family is failing.  I’ve previously written about boxes and how they enclose.  Yet it's more than that.  I feel our concepts and beliefs around family are seriously skewed.  Where did we get the idea that 2 adults with any number of children would function well in an enclosed rectangular structure?  The very nature of the squares and rectangles in most homes, large and small, is encapsulating.  No one can feel a sense of freedom therein.  No matter how many glass windows one has, the result of feeling captured is the same.

Add to the above, and both adults working for survival and personal sense of achievement, and you begin to flesh out the problem.  Who’s raising the children?  Teachers, television, iPod's, computers, smart phones, other unsupervised children, babysitters, daycare, shopping malls, and the accumulation of an amazing cache of stuff! Children today spend much more time away from family connection, in general, than with their tribe.

At one time in modern life, the nuclear family included more adult occupants than two adults.  Generations often lived together, or whole families for newly immigrated people.  That, at least, gave relief to the parents of full attention and responsibility for the children.  Extended family nearby further enhanced the picture.  If grandma and grandpa lived a block or two away, children had more access to possible nurturance.  Yet even that scenario was not ideal as all were still in boxes harboring their own dysfunction.

The inheritance then became behaviors that did not result in functional adults.  These adults propagated and resulted in family trees with a slew of problems: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, sex trafficking, depression, anxiety disorders, and a plethora of yet to be diagnosed mental challenges etc. The number of medications many young parents are on today is mind boggling.  If you take time to graph out your family tree, you may see my point. As an aside, I DO realize some of you had stellar childhoods and may not be able to relate, yet it is important that you understand the growing cancer of dysfunctional families among you.

I believe that if the human species is to survive, we must return to the concept of tribes.  Our physical structures need serious re-design.  Our neighborhoods need to develop as tribal communities devoted to the care and feeding of its inhabitants.  Huge cities need to end along with wall to wall freeways and endless shopping malls.  While technology advances us in many positive ways, it needs to be moderated in use for toddlers, children and young adults.  Education needs to return to human teaching and not depend on plasma, LED, and LCD etc.  We need to bring the human back into the development of our species.

There are many Utopian thinkers in this world.  It is time we culled their vision, listened to them, quit trying to replicate unworkable Band-Aid solutions or old unworkable moments in time like the 50’s, and envision a new world.  Let’s be brave, if it is to be the home promised is our national rhetoric.

What precipitated this tome was being immersed in a town that has grown and more than doubled since I lived here. Everywhere there are shopping malls.  Everyone is walking around with cell phones texting.  Commutes in traffic are normalizing at an hour or more. Smiles are few and far between except with clerks in stores trained to be approachable and friendly, so we are moved to purchase whether we need something or not. It’s all facade here.  Beautiful though that may be with the gleaming stores, sun and beach, it is not real.  I felt the same way almost 10 years go when I visited and was in Pacific Palisades.

Now I’m not targeting California for those of you whose feathers may be ruffled here.  Any populous state in the sunshine, tends to magnify what is not working.  Florida was the same when I lived there. Maybe cold and clouds mask some of it elsewhere; yet it is everywhere.  Denial is a luxury we cannot afford.

It is beyond time that we move past the unworkable rhetoric that most of our body politic is attempting to hypnotize us with. We need to deal with the very serious problem of failed family.  Mental, emotional and spiritual health is every bit as important as physical well-being.  Everywhere we see evidence that needs addressing.  To save the planet, we may want to think about healing its occupants so that they give the proverbial damn.  Whether you like Marianne Williamson’s bid for the presidency or not, she IS talking about the essence of our problem-Love! Let’s talk about this!

“In families you can find the source of every human drama. It is interesting because the cell of a society, the cell of a country, the cell of humanity – everything lies in the family.” Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu

“The more dysfunctional, the more family members seek to control the behavior of others.” David W. Earle

“To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life;  we must first set our hearts right.”  Confucius