family values

[maelorin]

until the baby boomer generation, families and in many cases neighbourhoods were extensively interconnected networks across generations.

the boomers were largely cut off, for various reasons, which has disrupted/destroyed those normal human relationships. in their place our societies put institutions and other dislocated (and money driven/poor) mechanisms.

western societies have the resources and the means to provide flexible, adaptive and adapted care for everyone - but we choose not to.

and blame the economic and social structures we create as our excuse.

the so-called push to return to family values™ is simply a conservative knee-jerk to their self-constructed loss of power.

every family has values, of some sort. the conservatives want everyone to have their values. like i'd want to live in a family where the male gets to abuse whomever he wants, and the female has to do as she's told. and the kids have to be perfect, all the time.

so our society is changing. that's what they do. what they've always done.

no way in hell i want to live in 'an sca/disney kind of world'. [apologies to my sca friends] the dream of 'returning' to some imagined version of the past holds no excitement for me. even if it were my own imagined version. the past is done. we live now. get over it.

Comments

Family values

[(Anonymous)]

From mary:
But this whole notion of "family values" is a myth which exists in the minds of a bunch of comfortable middle class BBs. Did J Howard, or P Costello, or K Beazley do it tough when they were growing up? Not on your nelly.
Cast your mind back to your contemporaries at university in Arts/Law or Commerce/Law or whatever the heck you did. If they were like mine, then they were pretty much uniformily from a comfortable middle class background, with aspirational professional parents (one or both), good fee paying schools, an environment which led to a high entrance score without too much pain, enough money to make 6 years of uni study comfortable and so a bit of a doddle through the courses and the subsequent PLT or whatever.
Where do some of the strongest proponents of the "family values" paradigm come from? IMHO, a paradox is that J Howard (with his vision of a "relaxed Australia") and P Costello (wanting Oz women to have one for mum, one for dad and one for the nation) have no idea that their policies are pushing Oz in the opposite direction to that white picket fence, mum, dad and the kids vision of Oz. Even worse, because of their comfortable middle class upbringing, they have no real experience or understanding of the troubles and the stresses that many of their fellow Australians now experience as a result of those policies.
Feh!

Re: Family values

[maelorin]

My point, exactly.

So-called 'family values'™ is a Conservative Christian SCAish fantasy of life as we wish it was™, with no clear connection to life as we know it™: except that certain people in positions of power +/- influence think it must be good for us™ because they believe it to be so™

Most of my colleagues were middle class of some variety. Most 'working class' kids know better, and get a trade. [I did Science (Biology), later Comp Sci, later still Law. The latter two to support career 'changes'. My brother is an electrician. He's always out-earned me.]

Seems to me that the qualification for 'politician' is isolation from reality.

I have real experience with and in poverty. I'm much there now.