It seems like there isn’t a weekend in Chicago this summer where we don’t hear about horrific shootings in the city and more innocent, usually young people dying. The July Fourth weekend was an especially violent one for the city. As the article linked to asserts in its title, the city has become a war zone. That’s quite a statement. Chicago isn’t Iraq, but I’m sure walking some streets in certain parts of the city at night might feel like it. What could cause such a cultural breakdown that civilization itself seems in peril? I would argue the answer is as simple as the problem is intractable: the breakdown of the family.
I know, on the right that is a veritable cliché, and the left thinks it’s overstated, but in inner city, lower class America the family, i.e. mom, dad, married, kids has all but vanished. Over 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried parents, and most are raised without their father living in the home. In a city like Chicago that’s probably even higher. All the sociological data tell us that children from broken or unformed homes fare worse in every social, psychological and emotional category. In what used to be known as the ghetto, these wounds from family dissolution are even worse. I heard somewhere that 80% of our prison population comes from broken homes. And liberals want us to believe that other factors than family are more important. That is simply not true.
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