“Men have forgotten God!” Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously thundered this verdict in a 1983 speech after his exile from Soviet Russia.
He was speaking of both Western and Communist civilizations, and he clearly referred to “men” in the generic sense of all humanity, of both (or, as we might say today, all) genders. It is hard to argue against his conclusion.
But today, on the eve of what the Hallmark Corporation has dubbed “Fathers’ Day”, another aspect of our amnesia is also evident. Men have forgotten to be Fathers! Our civilizational collapse is a clear result of both these plagues of memory loss. (Of course, the two are pretty obviously linked. One might identify the first forgetting as the ultimate cause, and the second forgetting as the proximate cause. Or vice versa.)
An overly-sweeping generalization, you say? Yes, of course it is. But it is a widespread and growing phenomenon. The statistics are hardly debatable, or even debated. More than a quarter of the 121 million men in the United States (that is, over 30 million men) are biological fathers of at least one child under the age of 18. Of those children, 17 million live in fatherless homes. The reasons are many: divorce, abandonment, incarceration, etc. But except for the death or overseas service of a father, they shed no credit on the modern father.
Children from fatherless homes account for:
Suicide: 63 percent of youth suicides
Runaways: 90 percent of all homeless and runaway youths
Behavioral Disorders: 85 percent of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders
High School Dropouts: 71 percent of all high school dropouts
Juvenile Detention Rates: 70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions
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O Ben Finiti 