Putting the Family First RK: I don’t know, but maybe it sounds like we are trying to be old-fashioned and go back to the “good old days” that never were. But, we are beginning to see what this generation that is coming into maturity now—they are not connected or associated with anything. They do not feel a sense of responsibility toward the culture, toward the people, toward the environment. They have not been imbued with that sense of family. And that sense of family is essential, I think, to extending your feelings towards the nation-at-large. If you do not have close family connections, it is hard to be patriotic because patriotism means essentially the family writ large: you feel a connection with everybody. Maybe another factor, too, is this overcrowding in so many ways and not enough jobs for people: the job situations set up in the country these days. I don’t know if you have read anything about what happens when you overcrowd rats. They start attacking one another and abandon their babies and things of that sort. So, I think the same kind of thing is probably happening here. One of the things about Stelle and Adelphi, the communities, is that people feel like we need one another; everybody is important. In the big cities, it is just like, “one more person just adds to that crowding and each person that dies—Good. That just makes more room for the rest of us.” If you get killed that makes life cheap when there are just too many people around. I think what happened in Los Angeles, a couple of months ago, was pretty much of an indication of people’s dissociation from other people and the feeling for other people. There was a pretty good article that I happened to tune in on channel Thirteen [PBS], not so long ago, here in Dallas, of how to rehabilitate teenagers who have killed others. They are just children, like fifteen or sixteen years old. One of the characteristics of them is that they do not have any empathy for the feelings or rights of another person. Nobody has ever educated them in that direction. Nobody ever told them that is not nice to pull the wings off flies or pull worms into two pieces and things like that. Life is meaningless to another person. Another person’s pain is immaterial to them. They do not understand the human condition or have a sense of what it is like to be caring about another person, as far as your life is concerned. They run them through all kinds of rehabilitation techniques where they teach them sensitivity to what another person feels and what another person’s rights are, so they can extend those feelings toward another person. Apparently it is very effective. They have a team of psychiatrists and psychologists who work with these kids so, by the time they are eighteen years old, they have a whole different sense. They have to act out psychodramas. They do that day after day, week after week, month after month, and it changes them tremendously. So, what their family should have done for them, just automatically, the State has to spend millions of dollars to teach them and to humanize them. The reason I brought that up is that the kind of actions, the wild kinds of things that happened in Los Angeles, is really a bunch of people who have disenfranchised from the human condition because they did not have a proper family to rear them; maybe just a mother and mother was off working all the time, and so we have a bunch of teenagers trying to raise themselves together, which by usually turns out about as effectively and just nothing. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies,” if you have ever read that book or seen the movie.
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