Thoughts For The New Year - Remembering What It Means To Be Human
Thoughts For The New Year - Remembering What It Means To Be Human
Humans are animals, but they are different from all others in a fundamental, qualitative way. They operate not on instinct but on what they have been taught, and what they have learned.
Within weeks a puppy is weaned of its mother and capable of surviving on its own. It already knows everything it needs to know to survive.
A human child is helpless for a very long time. When it finally can survive on its own it is not because instinct has kicked in. It is because the child has been taught everything it needs to know by those around it.
This teaching is not done by some government agency. It is done by adult humans who nurture and educate the child. We call these humans a family unit. Its exact composition varies from culture to culture and from time to time, but at its core, it is composed of the child’s parents.
These parents don’t just teach the child how to hunt or dress or feed itself. Much more importantly, they transmit values and attitudes. They teach the child the difference between right and wrong. The child learns stealing is bad, that the group matters more than the individual, and that telling the truth is critical.
Humans are in short social creatures. It is society that allows them to survive. It is because of society and its basic building block the family unit that humans have survived ice ages, war, famine, and disease. It is only because of family that humans continue to exist at all.
And, yet, in this country for decades now we have waged war on the family. We began in the mid-1960s by adopting welfare policies that discouraged people from marrying. A woman seeking benefits for herself and her children was in fact required to show she was on her own and not part of a married couple. If she could not, she could not get paid.
We expanded that to a broader more cultural attack. Marriage was old-fashioned. A woman who centered her life on being a mother and a homemaker was a lesser being. Raising children was for the poor and uneducated. If you were cool and smart and hip you put yourself and your career ahead of everything else.
Then we layered on the concept of self-fulfillment. For millennia humans had built their societies on the idea of serving something greater than themselves. No more. Now the most important thing was “finding yourself”. Putting your needs and wants ahead of everything else was all important. Only a rube would subordinate his or her desires to those of a family or children.
And, now we have entered a new phase of this war on family and society. Now we have begun the assault on the most basic building blocks of all. Gender is a social construct. Men and women do not really exist. You are assigned a sex at birth by someone acting in accordance with the outdated concepts of the racist, patriarchal, colonial settler society in which we live.
Be a man today. Be a woman tomorrow. It does not matter.
In any event, it is no longer parents who decide what their children do or think or learn anyway. The state does all that now. A teacher will decide what your child knows about right and wrong and sex and morality. That same teacher will decide when Johnny becomes Susie and what parts of his or her anatomy are amputated, altered, or surgically enhanced.
Even sexual relations, the most basic building block of relations between men and women, and therefore society are under attack. Sex is ultimately about intimacy and sharing and bonding. Or at least it was.
No more. Sex is increasingly synonymous with pornography and self-gratification, the polar opposite of intimacy. It is about isolation, loneliness, and a sick form of narcissism. Nothing matters at all beyond your own pleasure. No one else really exists.
The impact of all of this is all around us. The wreckage is everywhere. Generations ago mass shootings were unheard of. Even poor inner-city neighborhoods were filled with intact families. Murder rates were a fraction of what they are now. People, no matter how poor, existed in family units where they were taught right from wrong.
No more. Our children are in free fall. They exist online in a netherworld of violence and explicit sexual content. Their parents are nowhere to be seen.
No one steps in. No one provides direction. Adrift in a world of moral equivalency and devoid of role models our children no longer learn how to survive. They no longer learn how to be human. They are wild animals, acting on instinct, driven to violence and self-destruction.
Down this road lies ruin. Nothing could be more critical than halting this descent into bestial behavior. The answer is not some new government program. The answer is parents. The answer is family.
The answer is remembering what it means to be human.
YES YES YES YES YES.
Happy New Year and all best wishes for you and yours!!! Thank you for your writings. They are wonderful and helpful.
Beautiful essay. I want to key in on the family. Family is the first social structure one is part of, and in my world family came with obligations. Chores, standing up for each other in the world, helping each other out etc. I had a lot of responsibility young in terms of childcare for siblings as well. Family was not something I could just opt of out of , I had to participate in family events and gatherings - even if I didn't want to do so. There was a lot of 'have to' in my young life growing up wrt my family.
I watched that change. I watched people raise selfish children who weren't expected to contribute to their families at all. If they had chores (most didn't) they were PAID for them. In other words, they were entitled to all the goodies a family provided but had not responsibilities and weren't accountable for anything.
Such children are usually a mess by adolescence and struggle as adults. Of course, the Left has destroyed the family so many children never get to be in a real "family". Cuz living w your single momma ain't a 'family'...or your two mommies or daddies. That's just some people living together.