The Half Of The Story The Media Don't Tell You

I was shocked to hear on news reports this morning that poverty in the United States is on the increase.

The reports didn't say what the cause of the increase is because it just wouldn't be popular to name it.

From Citizen Link:

New Report: Record Increase in Poverty; Collapse of Marriage Primary Cause

The U.S. Census Bureau released startling new data today – one in seven Americans now live in poverty. This is the largest increase in recorded U.S. history.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the collapse of marriage is the root cause of the poverty explosion. Its latest report illustrates the direct correlation between the rise in welfare and poverty rates with the collapse of marriage.

Children born to single mothers are at least five times more likely to live in poverty than those born into married families. This is devastating news for 51.3 percent of Hispanic children and 71.6 percent of African American children who are born out-of-wedlock.

Glenn Stanton, director of Family Formation Studies for Focus on the Family, agreed with the findings.

“Research tells us that children are impoverished in every way we know how to measure a child’s well-being,” Stanton said, “when they do not grow up with their own mother and father.”

U.S. data doesn't always transfer to Australia, but I was reflecting on this point last night as I thought about the people who are in a different relationship almost every month and the children growing up with multiple step-fathers, absent fathers and so on.

And those are the people who end up at the bottom of the social heap and dependent on benefits, the children who are vulnerable to abusive relationships, and so on.

I'm not saying that this is all a simple cause and effect relationship because life is never that simple. It's not even as straight forward as demanding that couples stay together, because there are some people who should not be under the same roof as other human beings.

What I am saying is that the social experiment that started in the 1960's with the "free love" generation has pretty much degenerated into the exaltation of ultimate selfishness and has reaped a multi-generational harvest of dysfunctional, poverty ridden people who have no sense of destiny or purpose and no ability to hold down long term relationships.

Sure, lots of people are doing OK. But lots aren't.

We have now so normalised dysfunction that it's hard to see how we can return to the norms of faithfulness in marriage, protection of children... without some kind of divine intervention.