NP? fatherless children

[Doug Millison]

"[...] Yet, strangely, things go on more or less as they have. People keep
genuflecting at mass, entrusting their savings to the brokers and CEOs, and
believing that the President is a fine fellow and fit match for Osama bin
Laden, Saddam Hussein, or whoever it is. While his approval rating has
dropped from the god-like 82 percent he enjoyed in January, it has dropped
only to 69 percent--a level Bill Clinton would surely have envied. So far,
the only spirited response to the general collapse of institutional
credibility has come from those in the Catholic laity who are demanding a
greater role for lay boards in the governance of the Church. No one has
suggested that equivalent bodies--composed of, say, consumers, investors,
and workers--play a similar role in the corporations, or that the President
should be impeached for nodding off on the job.

Maybe we've lost the habit of citizenship, along with the idea that we--the
"ordinary people"--are capable of leading. Announce a crisis in our
institutionalized forms of leadership, and most of our neighbors would
hasten to stock up on canned goods and hunker down in their basement dens.
If no one's in charge--or at least no one you can count on--then it's
everyone for him- or herself, right?

Or it could be that the problem lies deeper, in our collective
subconscious. For at least two decades now, the right has endeavored to
implant there a shivering fear of, and sneering contempt for, the
fatherless condition. The only real families, the rightwing ideologues
insist, are those with an adult male at the helm. Households headed by
women are "broken"; the children of unwed women are, in right-talk,
"illegitimate" rather than "born out of wedlock," as courtesy requires. In
his influential 1995 book, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent
Social Problem, David Blankenhorn traced almost everything--from teen
violence to academic mediocrity--to the absence of strong fathers in the
home. If we were to acknowledge that "Dad"--in the figurative sense shared
by priests, Presidents, and CEOs--is a deadbeat, if not a criminal pervert,
would that make the rest of us social misfits and possibly bastards?

But even the most reluctant child must eventually wake up to the fact that
the grown-ups in charge can't always be trusted. What we have learned in
the last few months is that no one is looking out for us, guiding our
souls, or ensuring our future prosperity. And when the powerful begin to
act irresponsibly, it's the responsibility of the rest of us to take their
power away from them. "
http://www.progressive.org/August%202002/ehr0802.html