The Good Life? It’s Close to Home

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



The Good Life? It’s Close to Home
Rebuilding families and neighborhoods around the gifts each of us offers.

by John McKnight and Peter Block


When family members do not work or live well together we sometimes call the family dysfunctional. We prescribe professional help for the family or advocate for social policies that would support it—child care, parental leave, extended unemployment insurance, debt forgiveness.

But the real challenge to the family is that it has lost its job. The functions of the family have been outsourced. The problem is not dysfunction—that’s just a side effect. The problem is non-function, and this has much to do with the growth of the consumer society.

The End of the Functional Family

Consumer society has put an end to the functional family. We normally think of consumerism as buying stuff we want but don’t need, but it runs deeper than that. The essential promise of consumerism is that all of what is fulfilling or needed in life can be purchased—from happiness to healing, from love to laughter, from raising a child to caring for someone at the end of life. What was once the task of the family and the neighborhood is now outsourced. Aunt Martha is forgetful? Little Arthur is restless? Get them a diagnosis and a prescription. In this simple act, we stop being citizens—we become consumers.

The cost of our transformation into consumers is that the family has lost its capacity to manage the necessities it traditionally provided. We expect the school, coaches, agencies, social workers, probation officers, sitters and day care to raise our children. The family, while romanticized and held as a cultural ideal, has lost its function as the primary place to raise children, sustain health, care for the vulnerable, and ensure economic security.

The Rise of Neighborhood Incompetence

The neighborhood has also lost its function. Our neighborhoods and communities are no longer able to support the family in its efforts. In most cases, we are disconnected from our neighbors and isolated from our communities. The community and neighborhood are no longer competent. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-happy-families-know/the-good-life-its-close-to-home

[handmade34]

1. excellent article

Our rituals, our traditions, are what makes us human and what brings us together as people, families, communities...

...as Joseph Campbell explained in his wonderful interview with Bill Moyers, "...it is time for a new story..." The rituals of the Christian Church and traditions around it (hyper commercialized now) in the past worked relatively well to give us some cohesiveness as a society; that is no longer true.... it is truly time for a ne story, for new traditons and rituals...

[dbt]

2. Might well be the most important post of the day.

The excerpts alone are worth a K and several Rs.

[Demeter]

3. For Those That Have Chosen That Lifestyle, Yes

But there are some of us retro types, throwbacks to prehistory, who are maintaining family in the face of overwhelming pressure to eliminate it...even if it has a hole in it--like a missing parent, or deceased grandparents...

Some even go to the effort to develop relatives without blood relation.