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Politics and the Family
Making Politics Serve the Family
by
Richard M. Eyre
In
the last column, I made the case
for the fact that the family has always and must always remain the
basic unit of society. But families need help! The most
basic institution deserves more help from the larger institutions
of society, and parents, who have the most important (and most difficult)
job, deserve more help from the people we elect and appoint to serve
us.
A
political focus on creating stronger families is the most practical
kind of public preventative medicine. If all families function
ideally (caring for each other - extended families included), there
would be no homelessness, no poverty, no institutional child care
or elderly care, no neglected mental illness, etc.
Schools,
government, and the whole public sector needs to be thought of (and
to think of itself) as the support, the supplement,
and the servant of the individual families and households
that make up our neighborhoods, our school districts, our towns,
our counties, and our state. Households are like the factory workers
who turn out the actual product. The only reason there are shift
supervisors, production managers, vice-presidents or CEOs is to
help the basic worker do his job. If any of these larger positions
become too focused on their own preservation or prosperity and lose
track of the basic workers they are to support, the company will
fail.
The
problem in our society today is that the basic worker - the households,
the parents, the individual families who do the ground-level work
of owning and maintaining the homes, feeding and raising the children,
caring for the grandparents and paying the taxes are being neglected
and forgotten by the very institutions and individuals that were
created and elected to serve them. Too many public institutions
try to substitute for families rather than supplement them. Too
many politicians want to focus on "big" government rather
than "small" family issues, and too many parents feel
that the big bureaucracies of government and the lack of character
and competence at schools make it harder rather than easier to raise
families.
Just
as it once took the organization of labor unions to get big business
and robber barons to focus on the situation and the needs of individual
workers, it may now take the motivation and mobilization of some
kind of family union or parents' coalition to get our politicians,
our government, and our schools to focus more on the situation and
needs of individual families.
We
must simply put our money where our mouth is, or more precisely,
put our politics where our priorities are. We must demand, in this
coming political season, that candidates tell us what they propose
to do for families, that they bring issues down to our level and
relate everything to the basic unit, to the plight of parents, to
the challenges we face in raising our children and keeping our households
strong and together.
We
need to train ourselves and our politicians to think differently,
to look at every issue and every option and every idea and say,
"How will that affect families?" "What is the 'family
way' of approaching that problem?" "What will benefit
and empower families rather than weaken them or substitute for them?"
Ask the Hard Questions
As
society's basic unit, as families, let's ask politicians the hard
questions:
1.
What are they going to do for families economically? Where are they
going to simplify and streamline government and reduce our taxes?
What are they going to do to increase the child exemption or in
some other way compensate us for the difficult and expensive job
of raising children?
2.
What are they going to do for families educationally? Why aren't
there more character education and family life courses in our schools?
What about more volunteers in our schools? What about educational
vouchers to give parents real choices about where their kids go
to school and to promote more private school alternatives? What
about alternative certificates for teachers that qualifies practical
experienced individuals to teach certain subjects? How about more
teamwork with business and a state tax check off for a Teacher's
Education Fund?
3.
What will they work for to help families in areas of morality and
character? What about a community "value of the month"
campaign and other positive initiatives to go with stronger DUI
laws and pornography penalties and more streamlined adoption policies
to promote alternatives to abortion?
4.
What will they do to help families socially? How will they make
social services more efficient? What about encouraging and catalyzing
more help from the voluntary sector and recognition and assistance
to churches, service clubs, and private sector initiatives that
positively impact social problems and seek to strengthen families?
What about a family-to-family volunteer program where strong, functional
families are paired up one-on-one with dysfunctional or in-trouble
families.
5.
What will they do to help parents find the illusive balance between
the demands of work and the needs of family? What will they do to
promote flex time, job sharing, home offices, paternal and maternal
leave time, and other ideas for work-family balance?
6.
What will they do to be sure families have the wholesome recreation,
clean environment, and open spaces they need? How hard will they
work to keep polluters out? What about our winter inversions? What
will they do to support and sustain the arts? To keep rural Utah
environmentally and economically healthy for family recreation as
well as family residence?
7.
What will they do for families in terms of transportation and freedom
of movement? What about one way systems and car pooling incentives
and more HOV lanes to move traffic more efficiently and get working
parents home to their children a few minutes earlier?
8.
How will they help families with health care and insurance? What
about health insurance reform, cheaper, high-deductible catastrophic
options, caps on malpractice damages, and new or creative ideas
to make insurance more accessible and more affordable?
9.
What will they do about the safety and physical protection of children
and families? What about stronger drug laws and penalties for users
and better parent-involving drug education programs. How about
innovative ideas for gang breakup and control; and better school
safety programs?
10.
How will they work to clean up politics and to make the political
process more accessible to families and more attractive to children?
What about more extensive campaign finance reform and more complete
disclosure in political fund raising? What about shorter campaigns
and free air time and print space for primary and general candidates
to lessen dependence on big money
It's
not so much the exact questions or answers but the orientation
of candidates to the priority of stronger families. When family
becomes the framework and the lens through which we view
politics and candidates, we begin to hold the whole system, even
the whole society, accountable for taking care of its most basic
unit. Political issues that seem impossibly complex seem to clear
up when we try to see them in the perspective of how they will help
or hurt families. Join me next column for another, deeper look at
how the public sector can and should serve parents and their families.
This
is the second of a multi-part column on politics and the family
by New York Times #1 best selling author Richard Eyre. The
column will be ongoing at this site with a new article posting every
fortnight. Richard welcomes feedback at eyres1@comcast.net
and at www.eyre04decision.com
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