A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR FAMILY — REBLOG

In past blogs, I have mentioned three of the worst offenders to human happiness and well-being, my Three Gs: God, Gold, and Government. (Since I wrote this, my blogging friend Jill from Filosofa’s Word has convinced me to add a fourth G — Guns! I happily but sadly do this.)

By god, I mean any religion or philosophy that feels its members are better than the members of any other religion or philosophy, and will fight to the death to defend their supposed superiority, and they do it in the name of God, or Naziism, or Communism, or (and especially) Free Enterprise.

Free Enterprise also fits well with the G of Gold. Gold stands for wealth, money, corporations, global industries, national or global conglomerations, consortiums, and whatever else Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted would come to pass, and eventually the proletariat or industrial slaves would rise up and slay the greedy bastards. What they, Marx and Engels, failed to realize is: Forewarned, forearmed. They should have kept that part to themselves. But whatever, I still believe they are right and the bosses will have to one day be cut down to size, either at the ankle or at the neck. (Not that I want anyone to die for being who they are, but would I be able to stop a mob from doing what they wanted to do? I don’t think so.)

The third G stands for Government, another establishment structure that writes laws and more laws, all designed, according to them, to protect the society and culture of the nation they are supposed to be “guiding.” But really, they are “guarding” the interests of the top 1% of their populations from the 99% of people who want what the 1% have way too much of anyway. And if the slaves of commerce start getting restless, find some other government whose industrial slaves are also getting restless, and declare war against them.

(War of course is an aspect of the fourth G, guns. Guns represent any weapon designed to kill people and other living beings. There is no other use for such weapons but to kill, though sometimes they just maim. Whatever, they ruin lives, and not just the lives of the victims of the weapons, but the lives of the people who held those victims dear.)

The people in the government won’t have to go to fight and probably die on national or foreign soil, they’ll be sitting in their hideouts just in case the war blows up in their faces. The only people they want to have killed are the young men and women who are actually capable of overthrowing their government when their amount of restlessness exceeds their ability to be controlled. Meanwhile, of course, the industrialists are making fortunes hand-over-fist off making the tools and supplies for their young people to kill other young people with. It has been like this since the dawn of cavemen vs. tree-dwellers. And the only way to stop it is to get rid of all levels of government.

Meanwhile, there is another grouping of people that have existed since the dawn of cavemen and tree-dwellers that has even more influence on their societies than any government will ever have. Of course, I am talking about: the nuclear family. If you were raised in a healthy home environment, loved and kept safe from the perils of the world, not taught to hate anyone, or covet what the family down the block or across the village has, please raise both your hands in the air. The more arms in the air, the more parents of nuclear families can feel good about themselves, right? But how many arms are there in the air? Not many, you say, maybe not even one depending on who is present?

Well, butter my butt and call me Jed! There aren’t any healthy nuclear families in this crowd? Parents, didn’t any of you come from healthy nuclear families? Well, no wonder you may not have raised healthy children, you don’t know how! Your role models weren’t any better than you as role models. I’d say God help us, but I don’t even believe in God anymore. He was as much a fable as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

And so it goes, generation after generation, there aren’t any instruction manuals that come with babies, and the people that try to write them all have some kind of syndrome or other to begin with. Having worked in the addiction and mental health fields could have warped my mind against the nuclear family, but what do you want to bet my father warped my mind long before I even knew there were so many syndromes you could have because of the way you were treated as a child.

Just today (2017) the courts found a set of parents guilty of causing the death of their 15 year old son by denying him the insulin he needed to combat his diabetes. 15 years old, and he weighed about 70 lbs. when his body was discovered. His body was emaciated, and his pallor was the colour of the snow outside his door. He had not been allowed outside his home since he was six years old, and none of the neighbours even knew he existed, not in the province where he died. Back in the province of his birth, the authorities knew all about him, knew that his parents were withholding his insulin, knew they had to get him away from his parents, but the court ruled in favour of the nuclear family, because surely no parent could continue to be so callous as to not give their child his life-saving medicine. And as soon as the “nuclear family” left the courthouse, they packed up their belongings and moved. The authorities that had been watching over him never told anyone he was gone, so when the family found a home in a new province, no one knew their history. The boy slipped through every crack there was to slip through, and nine long years later he finally died. This is how the nuclear family works?

Of course I’m using an extreme example, but how extreme does a person have to get before people realize the nuclear family is failing worse with every new generation? In Vietnam and in parts of the Middle East, parents gave their ten year old children bombs and told them to give the bombs to the soldiers on the other side. The kids had no idea what they were doing, and they trusted their parents to keep them safe, but when they reached the other side and soldiers came out to greet the children, to get them out of harm’s way, the mother or father pressed a button, and the child got blown up along with most of the soldiers in the area. This is how the nuclear family works?

This wasn’t a random act, turning children into walking bombs. It is a reasoned act of war. How can we sit back and listen to the news that tells us these things are happening? In Africa ten year old children are recruited as soldiers of god, whichever god their masters happen to believe in, and taught how to shoot a rifle and throw a grenade. Should these children be held accountable when they had no concept that what they were doing could kill people? Well, guess what, the mighty United States of America thought they should be tried for war crimes, and placed in jail for the rest of their lives. If they happen to be Muslim children, President Donald Trump will probably put them in front of a firing squad. “No damned little Muslims are going to terrorize American soldiers!” And he will probably build a wall around the Middle East, and make the Arabs pay for it. It makes me wonder what kind of nuclear family he was raised in…

I’m serious as hell when I say, let parents have children, but don’t let the parents own them. If the parents cannot pass a set of psychological tests, take the babies away from the parents, and put them into a group home where professional parents who can pass those same tests work together to raise the little tykes, where the children are taught about things, but are never told “This is the way you have to be.” Provide them with love, safety, healthy foods, proper clothing, and toys and such, and mix the genders and the races in each group home, parents and children alike, and let them learn on their own there is nothing to fear in a world made of people of many races. There can be no corporal punishment in these group homes, and the children must be allowed to play in the same area as children from other group homes so that they can learn about other children, children of all ages from baby to near-adult. Give them the tools to live a safe and happy life. As they grow up, teach them various occupations suited to their age. Don’t make gender an issue, teach boys and girls the same things, including what happens with each gender as they reach puberty. And above all else, give them the power to think critically.

If you really want to save this world and all the people in it, deconstruct the nuclear family. Keep those people who would teach their children hatred and violence from ever bringing up children. These are the kinds of parents that keep the pattern of poorly adjusted physically and mentally ill children becoming the same kind of parents as they had growing up. Give the future generations the chances we never had, and save them from those parents who condemn their children to follow in their footsteps.

(I wrote this post in 2017, and still agree with every word of it. I confess I made some tiny changes but nothing that made any consequence to the theme of this post.

(These thoughts were not new even then, I had been refining them for years since my own childhood. It was my own nuclear family that forced ne to take a critical look at how I was brought up, and what inspired me to look for a better way to raise children. The above ideas are but one suggestion. The more people that can look critically at the nuclear family, the more suggestions there will be.

(The first step, though, is realizing the necessity to look at the nuclear family while thinking critically.)

Post Four – A Comment Worthy of Being a Post

A reply to Owen @ https://r2030.org/2021/03/29/what-is-your-ism-ask-the-dictionary/

Today Jill on Filosofa’s Word directed her readers to the above post. It was a wonderful post, about dictionary meanings of various political isms, so that when people were discussing their beliefs about those isms, they might know what they are talking about in proper terms. Then Owen added some personal comments, discussing his understandings of the isms he took a look at, and stating his feelings towards the same. I thought it a very timely discussion. However, I am not one to praise something just because it is wonderful and timely, which this post was. I have to still be true to myself, and look at its shortcomings while singing it’s virtues. It is for that purpose I left the following comment, slightly altered for clarity:

Dear OWEN,
Your cultural biases show through in your personal notes. I am not going to say you are wrong or right, though you are left of right and right of left (pun) in your personal ideology, if I may say so without rancour.
Liberalism promotes capitalism, but you do not mention this. Capitalism demands wealth inequities, which is not conducive to either peace or the greater good. You may prefer allows over demands, but that is a euphemism. Liberalism puts no controls over capitalists, and capitalism supports wealth for the few, and poverty for the many. I think this needs to be made clear.
Socialism does not in any way stifle innovation. That is a lie perpetuated by capitalists. Even in a socialist society there will be ideas to make improvements on established infrastructures, goods, products, etc. People to the right of socialism have this idea that no one in a socialist society will create innovation. That is what is stifling, the idea only capitalists can innovate. Anyone can do it. People are people no matter what the ism, and people like to improve what is improveable.
Communism as it is practised in the big three, Russia, China, and Cuba, do have totalitarian governments. This is not disputed. Nor have I ever read the Communist Manifesto, it does not interest me. But I cannot imagine anywhere that Communism demands a rulling party or ruling class. The idea behind communism is state ownership of production and distribution, but unfortunately it does not look at how the state itself is developed. Communist states are usually created as we know them by violent revolutions. This allowed the leaders of those revolutions to become totalitarian. But, were communism to be gently applied as an economic system that brought true equality to all people, there would be no reason to destroy democracy. Given the idea that state ownership is better than capitalism, more equitable in every human endeavour, there is no need for totalitarianism. There are more ways than one to gently guide a communist state. They have just never been tried.
Conservatism, or, in America, Republicanism, does not like change. Basically it is a servant of Capitalism, for, like my take on Liberalism, it demands that capitalism be the only way to run the economy, to the total wealth of the capitalists, and the total poverty of the workers, with a bit of room for a middle class that wants to become upper class. Bill Gates is an example of a middle class success story. But in reality, those examples are relatively few. Still, Conservatives want to maintain the status quo, which totally defies understanding by me of how the poor are willing to be dominated by them. But that domination exists, and it is perpetuated by the story that anyone can work their way into wealth–while reality shows they cannot. Most conservatives are quintessential liars!
Fascism, in my mind, should not even be included in a discussion of political systems, as it really has no connection to choice. (Neither does communism as we know it, but communism can be supported by democracy despite all evidence–fascism cannot be supported by democracy despite the fact Mussolini and Hitler both rose to power through democratic processes. Both leaders (sic) ran on platforms of extreme nationalism and extreme racism that spoke to their populations’ hopes and desires. Donald Trump recently tried to copy their successes (sicker) but fortunately just over half of Americans were unwilling to be misled.

Beyond that, I must take some umbrage at your statement: “[Fascism] is cause for abject terror for the liberals and progressives, who see this as nothing short of the total demolition of a lifetime of outreach and innovation.” By not assigning this “abject terror” directly to isms like socialism or communism is to imply those isms are willing to go along with it, to not fight against it. I think this is patently wrong, because most politically aware people in this world of 2021 are against fascism, no matter their actual ideology. I purposely did not mention conservatives/republicans, because as they are being practised in many countries today, conservatism is already halfway or more to fascism, and given the opportunity, they will become fascist. Just look at all the bills before state legislatures in America right now that want to restrict or constrict the rights of voters and their ability to cast their ballots. These are definite attempts to kill true democracy. As I understand it, the British Conservatives too are moving in similar directions. If these parties, Republicans and Conservatives, are not stopped immediately, the fate of the human race will lie in anti-human hands.

Another problem I have with your post is your trust in dictionaries. Yes, I said your trust in dictionaries. You stated you believe them to be neutral, and for the most part they are. But look at your definition 4 under communism: communalism.
How that definition was allowed to stand is beyond me, but there it is in black and white. But communalism has nothing to do with communism as a political ideology. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as 1. social organization on a communal basis. The Oxford dictionary defines it as 1. a principle of political organization based on federated communes. Your source, Dictionary.com, gives two definitions of concern here:
1. a theory or system of government according to which each commune is virtually an independent state and the nation is merely a federation of such states.
2. the principles or practices of communal ownership.
None of the above definitions come close to communism, and yet your source throws it in unquestioned as a lesser meaning of communism. This cannot be tolerated.

To be fair, all three dictionaries have another definition of communalism, but they are not pertinent to this discussion, therefore I ignored them. As it is, I only use this example to show even dictionaries make mistakes.

But, more importantly, while dictionaries are, to my knowledge, internationally accepted, we have to look at who is producing these dictionaries. They are being written by white Christian males living in democratic nations supporting capitalist economies, using the English language as the overarching method of communication. I am unaware of any dictionary completely and originally written, vetted, and published in any other language without being translated from English. I am not saying they do not exist, I only speak English, English is all I know. But any reference I have ever seen to a dictionary is never to one originally used to define words completely in the language of its creater if that language is not English. This implies bias, unintended I am sure, pretty much unrecognized, but nonetheless, undeniably biased to the underpinnings of English-speaking democratic infrastructures. Dictionaries may seem neutral, but they are not. And they are capable of giving biased definitions. They are only mostly harmless!

Owen, let me say, despite my many objections and hopefully constructive criticisms, I do thank you for this post. I think it was an incredibly good idea, a very much needed idea, but not a perfectly executed idea, for just like the dictionary definitions you used, they have biases written directly into them, and then we have your cultural biases added on top of that. I am not saying what I tried to add is not unbiased by my own biases. You asked where your readers stand on your political spectrum? I am not on it. For starters, I do not believe in government. I consider it to be one of the four worst-ever inventions of humanity, starting right from the earliest form of government existing–in the nuclear family–and reaching on up to the world government we are eventually progressing towards. Second, I believe people telling people what to do and how to live is just inherently wrong. (For your own edification, the other three worst inventions of humanity as argued by me are symbolised in the words god, gold, and guns.) So, those are the things that bias me. This world would be a much better place to be, had those things, and the things they represent, never been invented. But they were. In my mind, our task now as human beings is to evolve beyond them. Only then will we be able to live in true peace and true equality. That world is my dream.