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Fridav. September 4. 1992
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OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
IN OUR OPINION
Communication would help solve family crisis
If there is one thing you can count on in an election year, it is that the really important issues will never be truly addressed. Politicians sidestep, symbolize and sound bite their way through the process, never going any further than to dip their toe into the pool of confusion. The family values issue is a case in point.
In a recent poll, only 6 percent of Americans chose family values as the most important issue in this campaign. Yet, when Murphy Brown, Woody Allen and Hillary Clinton are the centers of the debate, you can hardly expect people to be interested or even concerned.
In reality, the trouble with our families is not whether they have family values. Rather, can our families put these values into practice in an immensely confusing and changing world. Unfortunately, it is becoming clearer and clearer that they can't. And the ramifications of this send shock waves across every segment of the population.
Study after study points out how the lack of a steady home environment is having a disastrous effect on our population. Drugs, suicide, gangs, teenage pregnancy and violent crime are just the headline issues that seem to be rooted in the weak family structure of this country. Every single day we have kids shooting up, shooting others and even shooting themselves. The only solutions that have even been offered in this election cycle are tax breaks and family-leave programs. Do we really think that these solutions are going to turn it around? It's no wonder that many in our generation are beginning to believe that the family just can't survive. No one is offering any solutions. Yet, if we don't find any, we are surely lost.
We must understand that most people don't purposely begin marriages and families with the intention of not having family values of togetherness and love. But, when these relationships face the pressures that all relationships do, the parties involved don't always have the capabilities to cope. In today's immensely complex and changing society, relationships have not stood still for us to hold on. They are growing and changing and evolving, and we aren't growing with them and our families are falling apart.
We must admit that neither we nor our parents necessarily have the answers. Considering that the divorce rate is about 50 percent, half of our parents aren't credible sources. And since we learned most of what we know about relationships from them, half of us aren't particularly armed with sound information either. Albert Schweitzer said, "We are all so much together, yet we are dying of loneliness." Realizing that most of us do not know all of the components of a good relationship will be the first step to our solution.
The second step takes some action. Without a second thought, a person can go through high school and even college and not get two hours of information on relationships, intimacy, sexual relations or interpersonal communications. Yet, there are quite possibly no forces in the world greater than these. We provide this so-called education and then step back and shrug when 50 percent of our relationships fall apart. We must make a personal and a societal commitment to study and learn these things.
Many will choose to laugh at this suggestion. But the breakdown of the family in this country will spare no demographic segment of the population. Christians and atheists, young and old and rich and poor have all felt, and will continue to feel, the pain of our failure. If we don't make a conscious effort to take some action, then all of the family value sound bites our politicians can spit out won't save our dying families.
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Real solutions, not lip service will solve families' problems
Imagine all the people in the United States filled with virtuous family values. There would be no more poverty, no more violence, no more pain and suffering and no more corruption.
Such a notion is almost as ludicrous as the idea that family values is a valid campaign issue.
What a lame position to take. Who would attack it? Who would say that it's bad for people to grow up with family values?
It would be great if everyone could grow up in a stable, secure family environment. It would also be great if everyone could fly like they did in "Peter Pan." The problem is, neither of these ideas is realistic.
The reality of the situation is that half of the marriages in the United States end in divorce. A lot of kids grow up without a parent — usually a father — in the house. And in two-parental families, more kids are spending time alone while Mom and Dad work longer hours.
STAFF COLUMNIST
Traditional families riddled with physical or emotional abuse don't give children family values. Traditional families torn anb arting parents don't give children family values. Children need positive role models, but the traditional family unit is not a guarantor of that.
The country doesn't need Mom to stay at home while Dad goes to work in order to have strong families. The country needs families — no matter how they are comprised — that can live in productive environments.
The country needs someone who is willing to tackle the problems that contribute to the deterioration of the American family, not someone who ramblers about an abstract concept. The country needs someone who
will put money and energy into America's inner cities, where poverty and violence have taken strongholds. The country needs someone who will find a way to provide health insurance and medical care to the millions who have neither, someone who will make education a priority, someone who will make the tax system more equitable for the lower and middle classes.
No president could achieve all of this, it would be naive to expect him to, but progress will never be made if these issues aren't even considered.
The country needs to be wary of a candidate who pays a lot of lip service to the idea of family values, because any candidate can believe in them.
But if his plans or policies are not conductive to strengthening the Amer-
Catch phrases like "family values" are dangerous, because the public is so easily swayed by them. They allow a person to identify with a candidate on a very superficial level. And they win supporters. It's a lot easier to latch on to an idea that sounds good than to take the time to examine a candidate's actual platform.
Dan Quayle started this whole mess when he attacked Murphy Brown's decision to bear a child out of wedlock. Never mind that Murphy Brown is a fictional character. Never mind that, generally speaking, television reflects American attitudes, it doesn't inspire them.
And now Quayle is busy touring small, conservative American towns, talking up his cure-all for America's problems — family values. Has he ventured into downtown Detroit to tell local residents that family values will solve their problems? Nope. Because they wouldn't buy it, and neither should we.
And George Bush has decided that in the next four years, he will be able to tackle all of the problems that American families face. He's already had four years, and what has he done? Other than ignore these problems, not much.
Julie Wasson is a Springfield, Mo. senior majoring in journalism and political science.
Quayle blind to actual causes of legal logjam
Quaule is a lawyer, although he's never really made a living at it. His wife is a lawyer too.
Sometimes it isn't easy to follow the logic of this political campaign. Especially when it comes tumbling out of Dan Quavle.
But he doesn't seem to like lawyers. And he knows they are an easy target. So he regularly flails them for filing too many lawsuits and asking for too much money and somehow messing up our legal system.
Now it is true that we have a lot of litigation in America, far more than in most developed nations. But what does this mean about why we have so many lawsuits.
There are corporations that sue each other. And the corporations can clutter up a courtroom for years on end. But you don't hear Quayle ranting about the corporations and their lawyers. Not if he wants to be invited to a golf outing at some private club.
MIKE ROYKO
cause of our crowded court dockets.
No, the biggest single flood of lawsuits, day in and day out, are suits filed by men and women who don't want to be married anymore. Divorce is the single biggest source of litigation in America. What, you thought it was patent infringement?
If you are an adult, just look around at all of your friends. If you are a typical middle-class American with typical middle-class American friends, you know at least one, two and probably more who have been divorced.
Besides, the corporations aren't the
My guess is that one of every four adults who has read this far has been divorced. Maybe more than once.
We have a high divorce rate in this country. And it would be even higher except that in recent decades young people took to living with each other before getting married. So when they split it didn't require a judge. She took the stereo, he took the TV, they filmed for the cat and adios forever.
Now, whose fault is it that we have so many divorces? The lawyers?
Of course not. Divorce lawyers don't rap on doors of strangers and say: "Hi, do you have a domestic strife? If so, would you be interested in going to Spitsville? Here's my card. Call night or day."
So why does Quayle keep taking cheap shots at lawyers?
Why didn't he stand up at the Republican Convention and say: 'Now, let me talk about our legal system. Do you know what the real problem is?' It is the millions of people who have hired
lawyers to file the millions of divorce suits. And who have gone back to court time after time to demand more money. Or to fight over visitation rights. Or to make false charges of child abuse as a means of punishing the former spouse you now hate. It is you who are to blame."
Sure, Quayle could have said that. Then he could have gone back to his hometown in Indiana and lost a close race for constable.
So Quayle ought to cut the bunk about lawyers. Lawyers don't sue people sue. And many of them are his supporters.
And if he had sad those things, he would have been unfair because he is in no position to judge why marriages end. People make mistakes. Most divorces are preferable to two people making each other miserable and their kids neurotic. There isn't much family value in households where hate is the prevailing emotion.
Mike Royko is a syndicated columnist with the Chicago Tribune.
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