Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Radical transition is difficult. (An illustrative case study is "Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety" - http://books.google.com/books/about/Pagan_and_Christian_in_an_Age_of_Anxiety.html?id=VBI6JppgQBAC)
Christians seldom focus the inconvenient truth that "the purest flowering of Christianity" was followed by 700 years of Dark Age. (I have never understood the "Christian" belief that terrestrial conflagration will "work out" any better than The Flood, another apocalyptic event "designed" to cleanse the earth of evildoers. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2011/11/daily-dose-111111-prohibition-and-curse.html)
Lest we forget, The Dark Ages began just 150 years after Christianity became the official religion of The Roman Empire - a shorter lapse than separates us from The Civil War.
As mentioned before, "optimum child-rearing" would alternate between mothers and fathers as primary, stay-at-home caregivers. Well-rounded children benefit from heavy "doses" of both parents. Alternatively, when mothers dominate child-rearing, an essential imbalance manifests. This imbalance is particularly notable in the problematic relationships between many mothers and daughters.
Note that Islamic women are singularly eager to stay at home to dote upon their children. Even so, I doubt Laura approves the outcome. (Yes... Patriarchy sucks.)
On the other hand, it is not only difficult, but impossible, to envision stay-at-home Islamic Dads without consequent need for Islam to radically transform its understanding of sex-and-gender.
I have not read the following book, but its existence points to a pending sea change: "The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family." http://www.amazon.com/The-Daddy-Shift-Stay-at-Home-Breadwinning/dp/0807021202 /// http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Daddy_Shift.html?id=vI8_ntqFZkoC
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Beyond sex and gender issues, I see Capitalist Consumerism as the linchpin culprit in "the downside" of America's social transformation. (Follow the money, Fred!)
Gringos have been narcotized by the metastasis of stupid -- and stupefying -- stuff, a foul dung-heap blown out the ass of American Capitalism.
Conditioned to be Pavlovian "consumer units," Americans now spend their substance on nonsense, on crap, on ridiculous baubles, on great heaps of unnecessary "stuff" whose chief "purpose" is to clutter our lives and hobble us like slave shackles.
Wikipedia: "The self storage industry is primarily a United States-based industry: of the 58,000 storage facilities worldwide in 2009, 46,000 were located in the United States."
What America needs more than grandiloquent recitation of dogma is an ascetic discipline of consumer "fasting" coupled with the creativity that can only be born of frugality and thrift that enables us to thrive.
By learning not to drool after Big Brother's most recently extruded baubles, we can (and should) live on half the nation's median income.
$24,400.00 is the federally designated "poverty level" for a family of four, and all of us might wisely live within this limit.
Cradle Catholic, George Carlin, nailed it: "Americans are f_____. They've been bought off. And they come real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis and sneakers with lights in 'em. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise the doofuses new gizmos."
Yes, women's entrance into the workplace exerted downward "wage pressure," apparently making it necessary for both parents to hold jobs. But this two-wage-earner assumption is a red herring based on The Theology of Consumerism.
America's chief stumbling block is the erroneous belief that we "need" "all this stuff," "all this crap," all this "sucking up" to Big Brother's "patriotic" representation of Uncle Sam.
In a word, we have been swept away by the deification of reification.
Hey! Want people to poke their own eyes out? "Just promise the doofuses new gizmos."
Not one gringo in a hundred can conceive the liberation wrought by frugality and thrift.
We must be smart enough to "live on little" - a way of life that slips the bonds of couch-potato-hood whose constituent legions lounge in great pools of flaccid flesh, physical exercise limited to whichever thumb controls the remote.
In this photograph, what is more likely?
Are we looking at two liberal women?
Or, are we looking at "conservative" victims of Cowboy Capitalism?
Although there is plenty of blame to go around, it is chiefly America's conservative Captains of Industry who would have us believe that gluttony, greed, envy and military-industrial wrath are bedrock American virtues rather than the deadly sins traditionally decried by Christendom.
Cowboy Capitalism idolizes The Seven Deadly Sins and achieves their corrosive goal more efficiently than Satan himself, bringing in tow the full spectrum of vice and consequent viciousness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_sins
Sure, there are millions of people who cannot "make ends meet" - whether from lack of income, or lack of imagination.
But "the poor are always with us" and as John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis all teach, the poor should "be taken care of."
In the main, Americans are staggeringly wasteful people whose squanderous obsession with kneejerk consumption and Pavlovian drool comprise the high water mark of Capitalism's creation.
Pax on both houses,
Alan
Alan: I am in favor of capitalism that acknowledges -- as Abraham Lincoln did -- the primacy of labor over capital.
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Pope Francis Condemns 'Slave Labor' In Bangladesh: 'Goes Against God' http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/05/pope-francis-condemns-slave-labor-in.html
More On Pope Francis And Slave Labor
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The first step in the transformation of "want" into "need."
