The Atlantic – by David Brooks
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”
After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.
This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.
As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there’s no extended family at Thanksgiving. It’s just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”
“In my childhood,” Levinson told me, “you’d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories … Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families’ stories.” The main theme of Avalon, he said, is “the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.”
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
Read the rest here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/
He actually says this: “The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.”
And also he actually says this: “The period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.”
I couldn’t help but take this article personally, like a stab at my own family, who did so much right to make life work, who were creative, innovative, resourceful, generous, and loving. No, we weren’t perfect, but we had something real, something intrinsically natural, and we had jokes and fun and side-splitting laughter, and nonsense and tears, and setbacks and breakthroughs, and everything made sense.
This author must have grown up in hell. Who is it here that is really “freakish?”
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“Brooks is Jewish but rarely attends synagogue.”
Perhaps he didn’t grow up there, but he was most certainly spawned there.
Just joos-a-jooing, is all. More “critical theory” B.S.
Critical theory–you nailed it. Maybe The Atlantic and David Brooks were “mistakes”!
So true, Martist and DL. Critical Theory!! Well, I’m highly CRITICAL of their THEORY. Ha!! I’m critical of their steering, their programming, their control which they disguise as the removing of control.
Dictionary: Critical Theory: “A philosophical approach to culture that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.”
Never any surprise who’s up to such mischief, but they are so busted.
🙂
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One of the planks of the Communist Manifesto for capture of the United States for international communism is the destruction of the family, and as this is an unlawful communist corporation that has been running this country since the illegal corporate takeover, the destruction of the family has been planned, calculated, and executed for that agenda, and it has been aimed at the poor with a vengeance.
I’ll bet 90% of the poor have to work the day after Christmas as they create their communist retirement communities and force the young into the cities because that is the only place they can find gainful employment, they tear at the fabric of the family.
The communist overlords have made sure and have the power to schedule the lives of the working people and do so at their leisure.
If you have four children, all on different schedules, it is not the want to be together, it is the ability.
These low life f-kers have reduced a free people into a commodity, a human resource, to the point that everybody getting together for one day is something that has to be planned for six months and it is getting worse by the day.
Our enemies fear the family because it forms a unit of trust that will not be breached and a unit of mutual protection where if one member is attacked, the whole family comes down on them, and though they be poor, by their numbers, they have the resource to fight where the individual or the single family would not.
I see in our family that the intentional barriers being placed in the way of family gatherings is being realized and overcome. If we only get to sit together for one day, the discussion will be the fact that we only get to sit together for one day and identifying who is trying to dismember our family and the declaration that they will not.
Quite frankly this scenario is uniting the old family men folk into units, intent on destroying these low life f-king Zionist communists and returning the world to where the family can be together again. They are not winning at this game. They think they can pull us apart and estrange us one to the other, but what they are doing is bringing us together, bent on destroying those who would destroy us. So if I can only get my family together a couple of times a year, you can bet your ass the activities are going to be shooting guns, drinking whiskey, and discussing the annihilation of the communists who think they can control us like this.
Stay in touch with your families, especially your extended families. With the facebook and twitter, if not used as a confessional, but rather as a communication device, families can make sure that every time one is within distance of the other that they come together and bring their children together. And it is important that the grandchildren and great grandchildren know their culture and be taught at a young age the survival skills passed down through the generations.
My family is basically poor, but if I call them all together, they will drop what they are doing and come straight to me. That is sons, nephews, nieces, their children, and my grandchildren, not to mention extended family, like my daughters’-in-law family, and all agree that these f-king communists have to go and our law has to be enforced and our men are second men with battle packs a-ready.
May these communist bastards burn in hell for what they have tried to do to us.
How many families were scattered due to their orchestrated depressions, recessions, and endless foreign wars? It is their policy to wipe out the large families, that is all except their own, because they know the power of a large family and the danger it presents.
They are wolves and they think us sheep that they can pick off one at a time and the rest will run and be content with not being eaten that day. But they are f-king wrong. We are the wolves and the wolves are packing up.
Much harder to see a family member killed in battle than a stranger, but the vengeance for the death will be horrific.
They have pumped their dope into this country. They have done everything they can possibly do to make it so one family member can’t trust another, but their success rate is pathetic. Those who have been lost to this scenario are weak, and though the family will inevitably try to save them, they will not be trusted except for those few who break free from the medicated alteration of their mind and become true human beings again.
Their success has been minimal as our ingenuity as Americans cannot be matched by their duplicity. And when this war finally gets into high gear, they are going to see how well we have maintained our family units.
I think so many of us are experiencing what you so profoundly describe here, Henry. Disjointed families, be it from the stress of paying the bills, from inflicted tensions that tear relationships apart, from the false template of porn they sell us as reality, and from all the multiple deceptions we are immersed in every single day. They have us dancin’ as fast as we can and I’m tired of dancin’. But I do have one last dace left in me, and that’ll be dancin’ over their graves.
The trust and protection that you say comes from a family intact used to be the norm. Now, speaking only for myself, I cannot find it any more. We’ve moved to more courteous and superficial existence with each other. I’m so glad you still have it and that you know such loyalty. I do try to cultivate it but it usually falls short. No amount of communication has brought them to the fight. So though I do not share DNA with you, I am glad to be in your Trencher Family where I feel camaraderie and affinity and determination and hope. You speak of “those few who break free from the medicated alteration of their mind and become true human beings again.” That is who I find in The Trenches. That is my blessing. Thank you, Henry.
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