By Stephen Smoot
During the Christmas season, many families gather together for faith, fellowship, and the joy of togetherness. They will help Mom or Grandma cook dinner. They will help Dad or Grandad gather wood for the fire. They will enjoy each other’s company and then, as soon as the wrapping paper is picked up Christmas morning, many will start to scatter again to whatever distant land they ended up in.
For a number of reasons, Americans have started to see the scattering of families across the nation, or even around the world, as a natural part of modern life. This dynamic, unfortunately, has led to much of society demanding that the government step into roles it historically never had to enter. It also comes with the price of needing more goods and services from a world of limited resources.
Many young people, and a few older, want to blame the economic system, but that’s not the problem. The social system has broken and needs a return to the foundation and fundamentals.
Individuals serve as the most fundamental social unit. Each individual comes into the world with natural rights and a direct connection to God, but the inability to directly and completely connect with other people. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity describes how each person, no matter how close they are to another, will never see them except as they were in the past. The past could be the James Webb telescope looking at a star 10 billion years away or one person looking at another three inches away.
One sees the object as it was, not as it is, and this is the fundamental natural disconnection between individual human beings in the natural world.
Individuals need each other and most need other humans for safety, security, assistance, and comfort. In a well-functioning community, those sets of relationships look like layered spheres that overlap like a Venn diagram with and interact with other sets.
Ideally speaking, the closest circle of relationships to an individual lies in his or her close family. An intact parental couple with siblings serves as the most basic unit because trust and respect serve as the ties that bind. When family works, it provides the closest connection that a person can feel. One instinctively goes to their Mom for comfort, to their Dad for protection. Mom provides for emotional needs while Dads often teach morals, values, and discipline.
The most basic of such relationships outside of blood comes with marriage, but that has become one of the most misunderstood relationships. Too many movies with “happily ever after” or breaking the marriage at a major misstep do not reflect the wisdom that must come with picking ones’ spouse or the almost daily work and compromises needed to keep a marriage in the best possible condition.
Of course like anything else in life, the greatest of the true valuables in life, like a good marriage, must come from work and with sacrifice.
Extended family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, serve as the next circle. Common family connections and traditions, such as holiday get togethers and reunions, forge ties not quite as close as with Mom and Dad, brother and sister, but still stronger than most other connections.
Also, children serve as a blessing to help Mom and Dad keep up the house.. They wash dishes, mow grass, take care of younger siblings, and can perform hundreds of age-appropriate tasks to help out. Those on family farms or mom and pop run businesses also should pitch in to help when needed.
More importantly, an extended family often offers its talents to help the rest. Grandmas, moms, aunts, and cousins can step in and help with temporary or regular child care. Other uncles, cousins, and others can bring their skills to help. Sometimes that might be repairing a car or home maintenance. Other families may have doctors or lawyers to help take care of needs within their ability. Having a generous family full of people willing and able to help in a number of fields makes life that much more affordable and, by extension, secure.
Traditionally and also ideally, but increasingly uncommon for most, is the next circle. Here one finds the church family, composed of a combination of friends and family members. In the past, each generation followed the other in the same church. Families connected through shared faith and values upon which are built trust and respect. Good times and bad times afflict church families. Sometimes people may fall out within a church family for long periods of time, but return like the Prodigal Son.
Like the close and extended family, a church family will mobilize in time of need. It will make sure that a family whose home burned has more replacement clothes and other items than they could ever need. It fills up a refrigerator of food in homes where people have taken ill or suffer from other problems. It will fill up a semi with needed items to send to a flooded community hundreds of miles away. Whatever sins individuals commit over time, the role of a church in supporting its closest neighbors or people suffering many states away proves its need and worth.
One of the things that has diminished the church family has been the idea that if a person has a bad experience in church, it serves as a legitimate reason to leave that church, or even faith itself, forever. Too many of these same people, however, will return to the same fast food restaurants over and over even if they never get the order correct.
Military veteran organizations, such as the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, have a similar function to a church family. They gather veterans who have shared experiences and emotions that others would never comprehend entirely. They serve as a secular congregation of mutual assistance and fellowship, while providing acts of help, comfort, and remembrance. Volunteer fire departments and EMS squads also share this kind of fraternal feeling and support, also having seen and done things that most will not comprehend.
Outside of the church family falls the professional, service, and educational affiliations. These include work and school friends and acquaintances, parents on youth sports teams, and other situations where people might see each other regularly. It also includes service and other organizations, such as the Ruritan, a Chamber of Commerce, or other outfits.
Last comes the community in general, represented by local government, non profit organizations, and groups of volunteers. They are farthest away from the individual in every social way, at least in a well-functioning society.
Communities build themselves over the generations. When they retain people, they retain knowledge and tradition passed down from parents and grandparents to the young. This does not just happen over a few minutes together at Christmas, but regularly through work, play, and socializing together.
Starting after World War II, this notion of community that was crafted painstakingly and protected by social mores, culture, and sometimes even law started to unravel. By the late 20th century it became normal, even expected, for most of the younger generation to pull up, move, and set down roots far from their hometown.
There, they must recreate a social support system from scratch, composed of people they may or may not be able to trust. They must figure life out pretty much on their own without those who have known them the longest available in person. They may find a spouse and have children, but more often in recent years, they find even dating too intimidating to comprehend.
Almost every culture in the history of mankind would see this as a horrific and cruel thing to force another to do. They would be astounded to see that the United States has turned this into a cultural imperative.
Put this on top of the decline of marriage. People enter and leave them with too much haste, with collateral damage in the form of children facing uncertainty. When the broken family accidentally connects with a mental or physical abuser, this creates trauma.
And when individuals who have left their communities to seek a bigger and better life elsewhere find these obstacles and pain in their path, what can they do? Meanwhile, when children feel uncertain, unsafe, and that life has lost predictability, they seek escape in bad behavior or drugs. They feel the anxiety of people left naked, vulnerable, and alone to endure the slings and arrows of an unkind world.
Also they have left behind the very people best equipped to give help or advice when trouble happens. Grandmothers, aunts, and cousins who can step in and provide either temporary or regular child care, or those cousins or uncles who can perform minor repairs on one’s vehicle or home, get left behind. When down on one’s luck, family will provide a few dollars, some food, or whatever else is needed.
The familiarity and love of family can also provide a place to vent or heal when the inevitable bad things in life take place.
As one ages, the blessings of family start to fill in more of the holes of need. Ones children can come and help more and more, mowing grass, watching over those who get ill or develop permanent infirmity, or an army of family just dropping by to make sure their loved one is okay.
American culture started defecating on the notions of a happy traditional family, regular attendance in church and faith in God, the vitality of service organizations, and other aspects of the structures and institutions that make a free society possible. Makers of entertainment and pundits from the media ridiculed these mores until urbanites and many of the young who think themselves “progressive” saw each element as contemptible and labored to heap more odium on these valuable and necessary traditions.
Government and community service organizations work farthest from the core and have the most challenge in serving needs because a number of filters stand between the intention and the actuality of serving the need. Additionally, the fracturing of family and the atomization of society left society expecting much from the government that it never needed to provide previously.
And that which cannot be granted without someone getting paid will eventually get billed to the taxpayers. Even charitable donations to non profits get deducted from taxes. When no one in the family can care for children or the elderly – or the individual has moved off or been just left on their own – society demands that the government provide an answer.
Here is the honest truth that most will refuse to see until it is too late. Government cannot afford to take the place of a well functioning and structured society. It cannot ensure that everyone’s child has child care. It cannot feed every hungry mouth. It cannot take care of every senior who needs help.
America must rebuild community by restoring cohesion, and that can only happen when young people stay in their community. The idea that there are no jobs to keep young people in small towns is no longer the case. Most businesses now go understaffed. Community members with experience and capability fill several different roles that take much of their time and often are exhausting, but there are too few willing or able to stand and help.
When young people stay at home, commit themselves to building families where they grew up, commit themselves to building and/or serving in these places, it enhances individual lives in ways they likely never imagined and allows their contributions to enrich their hometowns.
When young people move away, especially to larger cities, they risk the financial insecurity of areas that cost too much to live in and are much more complex to navigate. They risk losing connections to home and family without creating any social structures in real time and real life. They risk a life of abject loneliness surrounded by the Hollywood and Wall Street manufactured mythology that one must have millions to enjoy the American Dream. Unconnected to family, unconnected to the community that once knew them, unconnected to God, but unable to replace the bonds of trust and respect, it is no wonder that so many turn to drugs, fall mentally ill, or see life in despairing terms.
Not every family, not every group of childhood friends, not even every church will conform to the right vision all of the time. Evil and corruption exists. People will do wrong, or make accidental mistakes that hurt others. The bad apples and unfortunate incidents, however, do not mean that the whole barrel is rotten. Even Jesus Christ Himself had to deal with betrayal from the man closest to him. The exceptions to the rule do not disprove the rule itself.
American society, indeed Western Civilization itself, is unraveling. Like any structure, the foundation of both society and civilization is the most vital element. Without the foundation, all else crumbles.
In the Year of Our Lord 2025, it has become very evident that family is the foundation. Almost all of the evils currently afflicting society come fully or in part from the disintegration of too many families. At this point in these discussions, however, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Even the idea that the traditional family has value no longer holds much currency in many circles.
But somehow, to preserve a free society and a prosperous way of life, it must. Furthermore, doesn’t life, when presented in this way, sound much easier when one remains in proximity to the family and friends who know them best and appreciate them the most?
