Editorials
The state of disunion T he sense of an ordered uni verse is under siege. The earthquake in Southern California and the midwestern floods this past summer remind us of human vulnerability in...
...But he also knows and reminded the nation that government cannot do everything...
...Encourage adolescent girls to say no to sex, and teach them how to resist pressure from their peers (female as well as male...
...Government cannot do everything...
...But were such draconian measures made mandatory, we would see more families among the homeless, more abandoned or neglected children...
...In the absence of personal and social change, government can, in the end, do little...
...Unless individuals are willing to shoulder their responsibilities, especially for sexual behavior and the children who follow, all of the maneuverings of microand macro-policy making are for nought...
...Our welfare system supplies the meagerest of resources, yet even at that minimum seems attractive...
...In our toughest neighborhoods, on our meanest streets, in our poorest rural areas, we have seen a stunning and simultaneous breakdown of community, family, and work—the heart and soul of civilized society...
...Policy wonks can overhaul or tinker, they can reform health care, remake the welfare system, and increase the penalty for violent crime...
...What should government do...
...ET CETERA In a comment on a recent Supreme Court decision, a New York Times editorial [January 26] remarks: "Not everyone who opposes abortion and works against its availability is a lawbreaker...
...The most telling figure in this analysis is the one Clinton cited toward the end of his speech: "Within a decade more than half of the children will be born into families where there has been no marriage...
...Even the pagans have reason to repeat the old saw: (Wo)man proposes...
...That is the black hole into which our disordered state of the union is casting us...
...How then to discourage out-of-wedlock teen-age pregnancies...
...But given the state of the union Clinton actually described, he might better have cast these natural disasters, a la Lear or Macbeth, as echoes of a disordered human universe about which he did offer some astute and little-noted observations...
...Clinton said as much to the assembled Congress: "As you demand tougher penalties for those who choose violence, let us also remember how we came to this sad point...
...Not everyone who is prochoice on abortion is innately evil...
...Disordered personal relationships, disordered families, disordered communities don't operate in a social vacuum...
...Their effects add up...
...Single parenthood and its basic cause, children born out of wedlock, pose an irresolvable conflict for public policy...
...There is, moreover, another, not-so-subtle remedy standing in the wings—abortion...
...Right now that number is 30 percent and rising—among whites as well as blacks...
...Such children are have-nots in other predictable ways...
...The goal...
...The earthquake in Southern California and the midwestern floods this past summer remind us of human vulnerability in the face of natural forces unleashed with awesome fury...
...it cannot raise children or create loving families...
...Perhaps because Clinton watched his own mother, Virginia Kelley, struggle as a single parent, he brings a sobering perspective to a tragedy susceptible both to foolish romanticizing and to ineffectual stigmatizing...
...indeed, upon which the government itself depends...
...Who knows this better than Clinton...
...We are moved to respond in the same spirit...
...President Bill Clinton in his State of the Union address January 25 made reference to these recent natural disasters by way of acclaiming the can-do spirit of the American people...
...Welfare payments, food stamps, and medical care can become for an adolescent girl a kind of ticket to "independence," and for the father a way out of taking responsibility for his child and for 3 himself as well...
...For that, all of us need to find meaning in our own childhoods and in our own traditions and then to exercise individual responsibility...
...Teen-aged mothers, lacking education and work experience, would be hardest hit of all...
...This will at least make a social statement: conceiving a child brings with it financial responsibilities...
...Maximize the collection of child-support payments from nonpaying parents...
...At least the "independence" incentive would disappear...
...At last, a social problem blacks and whites share and, above all, can talk about...
...Such "novel" ideas are part of a little noted effort making its way in some sex education programs (New York Times, January 16,1994...
...Help these young women graduate from high school, help them finish growing up, help them become good mothers...
...they very often grow up without enough attention, security, discipline, and structures—the social connectors that allow them to participate in and build up "the heart and soul of civilized society...
...Deeply embedded in the disorder of our society and the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots is the most poignant have-not of all—a child without two parents...
...Give the encouragement of abstinence at least as much social and cultural support as distributing condoms and prescribing contraceptives in high-school clinics...
...For the Times, this is a truly generous concession...
...Here is the crux of the problem, the actual challenge to the state of the union: In a society where more and more citizen do not habitually feel and exercise responsibility for themselves and their families, government cannot tap into the reservoirs of social responsibility upon which the welfare, health-care, and education systems depend...
...Meantime, protect the children from their mothers' immaturity by surrounding them with other adults...
...There is a growing sentiment among moderates for a two-year limit for all welfare recipients...
...Some conservatives, Charles Murray for example, argue that teen-aged mothers should receive no public assistance at all...
...others have proposed a cutoff for any child born while its mother is on welfare...
...Remaking parts of the welfare system may help...
...Liz Leibold McCloskey outlines one proposal in her column: Require teenaged mothers to live with their families or in supervised group homes in order to obtain benefits (see page 6...
...God disposes...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 3
