Dan Mooney: Family should teach personal responsibility

By early adulthood, each individual should have developed at least a vague idea of a life purpose, a vision. Likewise, when a people band together as a nation, state, community or neighborhood, a bond should be established to serve a common purpose composed of each individual’s vision. On a larger scale, the socialization process should bind individuals to a national common vision — again, with individual behavior tied to that vision.

Unfortunately, America’s heretofore common vision is shattering. America’s embedded longitudinal values are split on most larger issues showing that Americans have allowed the nation to drift dangerously from our precious heritage. The left side of the split demonstrates a vision emulating whatever powerful “anointed one” they eulogize at the time.

When the “anointed one” moves further to the left, followers comply blindly, emotionally. Their current taste is to subjugate Americans to an idol with a blank amulet.

A conglomeration or coalition of leading leftist visionaries — the news media, entertainment television, Hollywood, the educational system, government, trial lawyers and unions — have created a morass, vague visions of undefinable hope and change.

What’s at the root of this American enigma?

For many years, I thought we all knew that parents should teach children the values that their children in turn would instill in their own children. Surreptitiously, however, for the past couple of decades, parents, weakened by this onslaught from the leftists, have slowly outsourced the development of their children’s values to this coalition.

Who is responsible? Led by the bewitching power of the conglomerate, which is more than happy to take on the task, the massive power base, composed of emancipated parents, has become significant fodder for the left’s political agenda.

Yet even though these purveyors of fatuous hope and change are getting what they want, they are not responsible. Ineptly, the nation as a whole is responsible, all of us. We have allowed it to happen. We have met the enemy and the enemy is parents and the family, the ostensible elemental force for unity within our national culture. I believe that recognizing the elements incorporated in the current state of the American family is quintessential to an understanding of America’s underlying pathology. Parents have prostrated child socialization and acculturation to leftist values and morality.

For example, responsibility, accountability, family loyalty and bonding are primary facets of the socialization process, but are difficult to teach and learn. These four traits should be taught in the specialized parental and religious acculturation process with support from the greater American society.

Can we trace how we raise our children to what we conservatives believe to be wrong with America? Does America need a shift in child acculturation?

Further, shouldn’t American parents return their child-rearing practices to the era of personal responsibility for their behavior? We should hold contempt for those who teach children group responsibility for their behavior and we should refuse to be hoodwinked by government handouts as payment for allowing and supporting our current blunder into socialism?

Dan Mooney, a 40-year Carson City resident, may be reached at Nevada4@aol.com.