Words&Dirt

“The natural thing for Zula to be asking herself at this moment was What did I ever see in this guy?  Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious.  Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches.  Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put her in mind of the family back in Iowa.  He was intelligent, and, as evidenced by the books stacked and scattered all over the place, he was interested in many things and could talk about them in an engaging way, when he felt like talking.  Being here now, alone (for he was down in the bay unpacking his gear), enabled her to walk through the process of getting a crush on him, like reenacting a crime scene, and thereby to convince herself that she hadn’t just been out-and-out stupid.  She could forgive herself for not having noticed the relationship-ending qualities that had been so screamingly obvious for the last twelve hours.  Her girlfriends had probably not been asking each other, behind Zula’s back, what she saw in that guy.

Which led her to question, one last time––as long as she was alone in the dark and still had the opportunity––whether she should have broken up with him at all.  But she was pretty certain that when she woke up tomorrow morning she’d feel right about it.  This was the third guy she had broken up with.  Where she’d gone to school, mixed-race computational fluid dynamics geeks didn’t get as many dates as, say, blond blue-eyed hotel restaurant management majors.  But, like a tenement dweller nurturing a rooftop garden in coffee cans, she had cultivated and maintained a little social life of her own, and harvested the occasional ripe tomato, and maybe enjoyed it more intensely than someone who could buy them by the sack at Safeway.  So she was not utterly inexperienced.  She’d done it before.  And she felt as right about this breakup as she did about the other two.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 90-1

“The ‘crisis of the family’ is more complex than is often asserted by political demagogues or others with an ax to grind.  In popular commentary, the received wisdom is to ‘keep it simple.’  I know one television reported who refuses to air an interview with anyone who uses the phrase ‘on the other hand.’  But my experience in discussing these issues with both the general public and specialists in the field is that people are hungry to get beyond oversimplifications.  They don’t want to be told that everything is fine in families or that if the economy improved and the government mandated parental leave, everything would be fine.  But they don’t believe that every hard-won victory for women’s rights and personal liberty has been destructive of social bonds and that the only way to find a sense of community is to go back to some sketchily defined ‘traditional’ family that clearly involves denying the validity of any alternative familial and personal choices.

Americans understand that along with welcome changes have come difficult new problems; uneasy with simplistic answers, they are willing to consider more nuanced analyses of family gains and losses during the past few decades.  Indeed, argues political reporter E. J. Dionne, they are desperate to engage in such analyses.  Few Americans are satisfied with liberal and feminist accounts that blame all modern family dilemmas on structural inequalities, ignoring the moral crisis of commitment and obligation in our society.  Yet neither are they convinced that ‘in the final analysis,’ as David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values puts it, ‘the problem is not the system.  The problem is us.’

Despite humane intentions, an overemphasis on personal responsibility for strengthening family values encourages a way of thinking that leads to moralizing rather than mobilizing for concrete reforms.  While values are important to Americans, most do not support the sort of scapegoating that occurs when all family problems are blamed on ‘bad values.’  Most of us are painfully aware that there is no clear way of separating ‘family values’ from ‘the system.’  Our values may make a difference in the way we respond to the challenges posed by economic and political institutions, but those institutions also reinforce certain values and extinguish others.  The problem is not to berate people for abandoning past family values, nor to exhort them to adopt better values in the future––the problem is to build the institutions and social support networks that allow people to act on their best values rather than on their worst ones.  We need to get past abstract nostalgia for traditional family values and develop a clearer sense of how past families actually worked and what the different consequences of various family behaviors and values have been.  Good history and responsible social policy should help people incorporate the full complexity and the tradeoffs of family change into their analyses and thus into action.  Mythmaking does not accomplish this end.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 21-2