PARKER: After the Shootings Lets Look to Our Nations Culture Not Politics

In a culture of meaninglessness Faith builds a sense of belonging to something true & greater than ourselves

By Star Parker

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WASHINGTON D.C. (Texas Insider Report) The nation is now enduring another gut-wrenching tragedy with at least 31 having been senselessly gunned downed in Texas and Ohio. My appeal is to consider these tragedies a crisis of culture and not to turn them into politics as has already happened.

Its a great temptation to simplify what is complex and this tends to mean translating everything into politics looking for some particular individual to blame and looking for some simple policy answer that will allegedly solve the problem.

But these tragedies are not simple and not partisan.

All this and the trends I mention below has occurred as Christianity once a pillar of American society has been pushed to the margins.

Per Gallup in 1974 65 of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church or organized religion.

By 2019 this was down to 36.

As faith and eternal truths become more marginalized more young people particularly young males become isolated and left with a sense of meaninglessness. They lose the key framework through which one takes personal responsibility for his or her life.

Im reminded about the words of Robert F. Kennedy when he spoke to a crowd in Indianapolis in April 1968 after hearing the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered.

In this difficult day in this difficult time for the United States it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in said Kennedy.

He himself would be assassinated shortly thereafter.

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Kennedy appealed to Americans to move away from polarization and hatred and toward love and wisdom and compassion.

Such tragedies have occurred too often in our nation and have occurred under Democratic as well as Republican regimes.

There is a sickness in the soul of our nation and that sickness plays its way through and winds up expressed in deadly pathological acts of lonely lost confused individuals -- disproportionately young males.

If we look we can see other telling symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention reports that the rate of suicide in the nation is the highest since 1942.

  • From 1999 to 2017 the suicide rate increased 33 and in 2016 suicide was the second leading cause of death in the age range of 10 to 34.
  • The rate of suicide among young men is more than three times higher than that of young women.

On the other side of the spectrum while young Americans are taking their own lives at an increasing rate fewer are bringing new life into the world.

The CDC reports that in 2018 for the fourth year in a row the nations fertility rate the number of births per 1000 women ages 15 to 44 dropped and hit a historic low. And this has occurred coincidentally with a drop in the rate of marriage.

The percentage of American adults who are married is one-third less than where is stood half a century ago.

Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has written about the huge exit of prime-age males 25 to 54 from the workforce. In 1965 according to Eberstadt 96.6 of prime-age males were working.

Now its 88.5 meaning millions of prime-age males have abandoned the workforce.

There is a great price to be paid for a culture that lacks meaningfulness.

After

Faith builds a sense of belonging to something true and greater than oneself.

  • It provides meaning and an anchor in times of difficulty and uncertainty.
  • It produces an inclination to look for others to blame for their difficulties for their personal struggles. Sometimes it becomes violent.

This is what we should be thinking and talking about rather than simple political answers and who to blame.

We must try to grasp the nature of this pathology and consider how it may be addressed.

For more on Star Parker and CURE visit the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) or follow her on Twitter @UrbanCURE or follow her on Facebook.

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