the whole gay marriage thing (part 2)

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[the typical part 2 post, in which mkf strays from the topic at hand and goes all general (even though everybody knows he'll somehow manage to tie it all up in a nice, neat bow by the time he gets to the end of part 3 like always, right?)

yeah, maybe--we'll see.]

disclaimers:

1. this is one of those "when i was a kid, things were different" posts that people my age tend to write when they get drunk.

2. for those of you who haven't figured this out already, i am judgmental as hell.

3. everything i'm about to say has probably already been said better by smarter, more eloquent and qualified people than me--but they're not here, are they?

4. this is a long one--feel free to skip it if it's not your cup of tea.

* * * * *

i've lived through a very interesting time in western civilization--i was born in america in the repressive nineteen-fifties, grew up in the crazy, emergent flux of the sixties, and came of age in the anything-goes seventies. and now i find myself in the waning days of the first decade of the new millennium, looking around at the smoking wreckage of our culture and trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong.

and while i could go on endlessly about all the myriad ways in which western civilization is falling apart (and often do just that), today i'm gonna confine myself to talking about marriage and family.

i'm one of those people who believes that--all the bells, whistles and ipods aside--we're really not very far evolved from those cavemen huddled around their communal campfires 10,000 years ago, no matter how technologically advanced we've become in the meantime.

my belief is supported by any number of twentieth-century [i.e., the first time in history in which this even became a debatable issue] studies which have shown, time and again, the importance of such contributing factors as family, community and continuity to the overall health and well-being of the individual, not to mention society at large.

and while i can't speak from first-hand experience about what's happened over the majority of recorded civilization, i can sure as hell give you my impressions of how drastically the concepts of family, community and continuity have diminished in the scant 52 years of my lifetime.

let's begin, shall we?

* * * * *

i was twelve before i ever met a kid from a broken home.

today? a kid could easily go twelve years before he met another kid whose parents had not only bothered to get married before he was born, but were actually still together.

i was at least twenty before i came across my first out-of-wedlock kid.

today? taken as an average, a kid's chances are close to 50/50 of being born a bastard in america [but of course we don't use that word anymore, because that would be judgmental]. and if a kid's black? try at least 70% and climbing.

when i was a kid, most families in the neighborhood had at least two kids, and usually more like three or four. and women didn't bitch or complain about how hard it was back then--they just had 'em and raised 'em.

today? if a woman somehow manages to squeeze out one kid (after extensive fertility treatments, more often than not), she then spends the remainder of its childhood whining constantly about how "exhausted" she is all the time--you know, from shuttling its ass back and forth to day care.

when i was a kid, the only mother i knew who opted to work rather than raise her own kids was my aunt anna (which, btw, everyone agreed was best for all concerned).

today? stay-at-home moms are the rare exception, routinely vilified by feminists (and feeling-guilty working moms) as stupid brood cows who've sacrificed their personal development and innate rights as liberated women for something as trivial and menial as childcare--especially since everybody knows day care's just as good.

when i was a kid, most families had small houses with one mortgage, one car (my dad had a company car, thank god), one television, one telephone, small bathrooms, strip closets, and savings in the bank.

i'll let you fill in the "today?" part of this one for yourself.

when i was a kid, when two people came together and made a family, the dad went to work every day even if he hated his job, the mom stayed home and raised her kids even if it bored her, they didn't routinely fuck other people, and they tended to stay together even if they drove each other crazy.

today? none of that's true: marriages tend to splinter apart at the first provocation, with both partners happily heading off to begin new families, oblivious of the damage such action might do to their children.

* * * * *

if i'm in the car when she's on, i'm generally listening to dr. laura.

over the course of the twenty years i've listened to this harsh, brilliant woman, i can't tell you how many of her calls have come from casualties of broken homes.

they all tend to follow predictable patterns: the mothers and fathers recover fairly quickly and move on to their next marriage--their calls tend to be about how they can't understand why their (or their new spouse's) kids can't adjust to the new reality as quickly as they, the grownups, did.

it's the kids that get to me (and her): the boys who lose their fathers to some other woman and then have to live with some clueless stranger-stepfather who's suddenly fucking their mother--and in their impotent, testosterone-fueled reactive rage, fuck up their own lives in often irreversible ways.

or the girls who lose their fathers to a bitchy stepmother who shuts them out of "her" home and forces them to look for fatherly validation in the arms of some guy who knocks 'em up and leaves 'em.

and then there's the calls from the lost ones whose mothers never gave 'em a father in the first place.

* * * * *

when i was a kid, my father killed himself.

as hard as that was on me and everyone else he left behind, you know what would've been worse?

i'll tell you what: if my father had done what most dads do today--i.e., left my mother and gone and married some other woman and raised her kids and/or had new kids with her, and then my mother had married some other guy and had kids with him, and i was shuttled between the two households--a visitor in both, belonging to neither--and they were all too busy working, buying shiny, useless crap and raising their new kids to pay any attention to me.

that would've definitely been worse.

* * * * *

as i look around at all the young, vacant-eyed sociopaths wandering the streets and malls of america today without even the slightest notion of what family, community and continuity mean--you know, the bright, young hopes of our future--i can sorta understand why the muslims hate us.

i can also sorta understand why adulterers were once stoned, bastards were once shunned and women were once subjugated to barefoot-and-pregnant existences--there was totally a method to that old madness.

(that's not too strong, is it?)

[part 3 to come]