Traditional Family Values

It’s not that hard to identify the requirements for an environment that supports families – traditional or not; a stable employment environment; a living wage and avenues for advancement – for our working class population. In 1992, the Republican Party made support of traditional family values part of its formal platform. Since then, however, the Republican Party has worked resolutely to create an environment in which traditional families can hardly exist, much less flourish.

In times past, America had the requisite environment, if only briefly. But we can’t go back, having been swept up in a tide of ever increasing industrialization, with corporations, and now mega-corporations, employing and exploiting the masses, continually working to support the welfare of the wealthy elite rather than supporting America’s economy as a whole.

Ronald Reagan famously declared “government is the problem.” If that’s true, then we are the problem, because, in our representative democracy, we are the government. And the government will continue to be a part of the bigger problem as long as we keep electing representatives who serve as proxies for the wealthy elite, rather than acting in our best interests.

As I said, we can’t go back, but we can go forward. The infrastructure program that Congress is working on now, if implemented, would be a major step toward the goal of an environment in which the working class can flourish. We may never have an opportunity like this again.

John H. Terrell