Our Loss, Our Peril

I come from a long line of divorce. My parents were divorced when I was two (or younger--I don't remember, it was a long time ago), and both of my sets of grandparents were divorced. And though I don't have a firm grasp on the more distant roots of my family tree, I know that at least one of my sets of great-grandparents were divorced before them.

You probably already know where this is going, but please lend me your attention anyway. I promise I won't preach at you or repeat the worn cliches that have blunted all of our dialog about the American family.

I love my parents. Both of them. And I love all my grandparents, living and dead. I think they are all good and admirable people. Their failure to sustain their first marriages does not make them failures as human beings. But here is a truth: their children have suffered. It is an inevitability, when two people who got married and had kids decide they can't wait till death do they part, that their offspring will pay dearly.

This is an obvious truth, but it is so buried in the terror of offense that it seems almost impolite to say it. Divorce sucks. It's stupid and wrong and it represents a crumbling of health and holiness. In retrospect, it is easier to see the costs of failed marriages in the repercussions that manifest in the lives of those who are totally blameless; no child ever caused his or her parents to split up, but they bear the heaviest cost.

As horrible as divorce is, however, it has become the norm. There is a popular line of humor, lately, suggesting that marital longevity is some sort of torturous feat. That if two people have been together for more than twenty years, it's almost a given that they're miserable. The people who preach this stuff seem to think they're cutting into fresh and necessary truth, but in fact they have been blinded by misery. It's easy to look around and see what's done the blinding. Lots of married people are unhappy.

This presents us all with an important question: Should we accept something on the basis that it has become status quo? I hope that sounds familiar to you, because its answer has motivated every socially progressive agenda ever. We are not tolerant of hopelessness, nor should we ever be. And yet the received wisdom of our era is that marriage is a fleeting institution of mutual gratification at best, and a nightmarish consensual prison at worst.

Last week, I asked the question, "What one thing poses the greatest threat to the future of the United States?" What is the United States? Is it the institution of our federal or state governments? Is it the physical territory that occupies the bottom half of North America? Is it the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the current fifty-mile ream of active legislation?

Some wise people have described our nation as a set of ideals, and I like that. But the thing about an ideal is that it only exists in the mind of a person. Principles, truths that dictate human behavior, wisdom distilled from ages of hard learning--these are things that evaporate into nothing if they are not held in the minds and hearts of a people. But what holds them there over generations?

Our answer has always been education. That's fair, but we seem to be doing a pretty lousy job of it lately. Lots of people have lots of ideas as to how we can do better, but there are only a comparatively few lonely voices suggesting the painful notion that perhaps the youth of this country are too busy paying the high cost of their parents' mistakes to have the time or energy to absorb the sorts of principles upon which this great country was founded.

There is, of course, endlessly more we could and should say about marriage--what it's for, and what we lose when it fails--but for now, I'll try to summarize my ramblings thus far. The family is the only institution capable of deeply educating the nation's children to become powerfully contributing citizens. We don't want to believe this, because the ideal nuclear family, that bastion of love and learning, has become so rare. Easier to claim that it is outdated, and that our society has "evolved" beyond that simplistic model. And so many of us have ceased to strive for it.

In so doing, we have opened the gates of catastrophe. How, in our dust-speck efforts, can we close them up again?