My other coworker laughed, "Man, I grew up alone. My mom was always gone. I remember spending most of my time at home alone. I raised myself," he said. "You new parents are wimps. We used to be home alone all the time."
This started me to thinking about what they'd both said and the generation gap between their respective viewpoints.
When I was a little kid, someone somewhere, either politicians or judges (as if there was a difference) changed the laws governing divorce. No-fault divorce became the law of the land. Conservatives Christians warned that this would have disasterous consequences, signaling that the institutions of marriage and the family were unimportant.
Liberals and Leftists laughed and dismissed the warnings as typical religious fanaticism. Christians had said it, so it must be stupid and wrong.
Divorces began to sweep the country. Half the kids I knew suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war zone. After the devastation was done, these kids ended up living in single-parent, primarily fatherless, homes. They went home to an empty house because the parent they lived with was working and not home to let them in. The media labeled these kids "latchkey kids" because it was a new phenomenon for most of us, and thus it required a catchy label for the news.
It had been the norm in California for a long time, but now it was the norm for all of America.
Mostly the homes were fatherless because the mother was given custody almost every time, just like today. The boys seemed most devastated by this, as were the fathers. Twenty years later the United States had been transformed into a highly feminist nation and remains so to this day.
Yes, I think the two events are related, now that I think about it.
Today, parents who have kids at home alone are considered criminals. If anything happens, anything that draws the attention of the police, fire department, or paramedics - junior falls down the stairs, sets the house on fire, finds Mom's gun and shoots the neighbor - the parent is often charged with a crime for not being home. Once upon a time, to be charged with a crime required that the person charged demonstrate criminal intent. In other words, if Mom intended for her daughter to set the house on fire or her son to accidently shoot the neighbor, then she may be charged with a criminal act. But today, if Mom or Dad simply has no choice in giving Junior a housekey and leaving him to let himself in, well that's just too bad. If anything goes wrong, Momma is on the news that night and in jail the next day.
Whenever there's a story in the news about some kid home alone setting the place on fire and killing the brothers and sisters people's knee-jerk reaction is to say, "those parents should be thrown in jail for that!"
I can remember when this all started and how we got here. What I don't remember is exactly how we came to a point where throwing people in jail because of things they can't control became our solution for everything.
And where are all those people who said no-fault divorce wouldn't cause any problems and didn't devalue the institution of marriage or harm the family, which is the foundation of civilization? They're the ones crying out the loudest for the jailing of those parents while at the same time arguing that we should change the whole definition of marriage.
Whatever happened to the requirement that prosecutors demonstrate that the accused had criminal intent before criminal charges could proceed?
Now that we're to the point of not even remembering why marriage is important and not having any leaders who are man enough to defend it because they might have to offend someone by saying, "No", what's going to happen to our society as a result?
A tangental thought that just ran through my brain: How far does a civilization have to fall before it's considered to have fallen? And what's the divorce rate in China, our biggest threat and fastest growing rival?
Am I the only one who thinks about these things? Am I the only one who wants to know where this ship is headed and why we seem to be taking on water? Maybe I don't watch enough TV or else I'd be more relaxed? Everything is probably just fine. I worry too much.
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