How Liberalism Is Devastating the Black Community

If President Obama wishes to do something really helpful to protect children he might direct his attention to the epidemic of fatherlessness that's ravaging our nation's minority communities and placing millions of young black kids, particularly males, at risk. Lee Habeeb at National Review has an excellent article on this crisis, a crisis that the media seems largely disinclined to discuss.

I'd like to display it in its entirety but I'll just give you this and urge you to read the rest at the link. Be especially sure to read the story of the elephants:

Twenty children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Conn., last month, and the media quickly, and justifiably, descended to tell the tragic story. In the first few weeks of January in Chicago, 25 people have already been murdered. Most were young black and Hispanic men, murdered by other young black and Hispanic men.

In Chicago, it’s Newtown every month. But the media haven’t converged on Chicago this month.

You don’t know the names of those kids and adults gunned down in Chicago this January, all by handguns....You don’t know the names of the other 530 young people, most of them minorities, who were killed in Chicago between 2008 and January 2012 either. You don’t know their names, and the national media haven’t parked their media trucks in Chicago, because the liberal narrative does not offer easy answers to the problems haunting Chicago.

You don’t know their names because the real racism that exists in the media is this: A young black male’s life is not worth reporting when it is taken by another black male. You don’t know the names because the media don’t or can’t blame the deaths in Chicago on a weapon like the AR-15, or on the NRA.

You don’t know their names because the media aren’t interested in getting at the real cause of much of the senseless gun violence in America: fatherlessness. About 20,000 people live in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., and there are probably twice as many guns. Folks own handguns, shotguns, rifles, and all kinds of weapons I’ve never even heard of. But I can’t remember the last murder story in the local paper.

That’s because my town has lots of guns, but lots of fathers, too.

Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem; it has a father problem.

Gun control isn’t the problem on Chicago’s streets; self-control is. When young men don’t have fathers, they don’t learn to control their masculine impulses. They don’t have fathers to teach them how to channel their masculine impulses in productive ways.

When young men don’t have fathers, those men will seek out masculine love — masculine acceptance — where they can find it. Often, they find it in gangs.

In my little town, if some boys tried to form a gang and do violence on our streets, the fathers wouldn’t bother calling the sheriff. Those boys would face a gang of fathers hell bent on establishing order in our community. And if that meant using physical force, so be it.

Why is the slaughter in Chicago not deemed worthy of national media attention? Perhaps the liberal media, as Habeeb suggests, simply doesn't care about the plight of black kids, but I'd rather withhold that uncharitable allegation to offer as a last resort. I think there are several other reasons that seem to me more plausible.

First, the fatherlessness epidemic can be convincingly tied to the welfare state, a sociological phenomenon that has been promoted and expanded by liberals for fifty years. The liberal media is reluctant to call attention to the slow-motion disaster occurring in our minority communities because it's largely due to a set of policies that media liberals have themselves been vigorous proponents of.

Second, liberalism has been telling us for those same fifty years that fathers are not all that important anyway, that the traditional family is oppressive, that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," and the media is understandably loath to run stories that show in stark tones the utter destructiveness, fatuousness, and idiocy of these claims.

Third, the ongoing degradation of our culture - the hypersexualization, the violence, and the secularization that pollute the cultural sea in which young men swim - is leading to its predictable denouement, and all of these trends have for the last five decades been facilitated and encouraged by liberalism and the liberal media.

Readers have occasionally questioned me as to why I'm so impatient with liberalism and its instantiation in the modern Democratic party. My response is, in light of the above how can anyone not be?