Questioning the Nuclear Family

I saw this quote today and it resonated with me. As some know, here I have done my own questioning of the nuclear family in the article "Family as a Sacred Cow".

The nuclear family is not a crucible of love and support for many people anymore. We definitely are questioning the entire system. Religion definitely has shoved "family-first" down our throats for eons. Anyhow I thought this was a great quote that described much of what I was talking about too.

 Seen on Facebook from a "Douglas Frederick", where the group was discussing suicide....

 "It is the failure of all these "loved ones," the collective of all us which are so busy with our own lives and so disconnected from and unaccountable to one another that lets people slip through the cracks, whether they hurt themselves or someone else. If we truly care about any such transgressors and lost ones, we'll have to get serious about reordering our priorities and shifting our values to recreate a society which tends to and loves each person in it. People committing suicide in our midst is testimony to something broken in the entire social structure. Blaming anyone is pointless. But, what are we willing to do to remedy it?

This reassessment includes our love affair with the nuclear family arrangement we are for some reason so attached to, despite how unhealthy and unnatural it is for a social species. Suicide, murder, and rape are typically unheard of in tribal type social groups. Children can be horribly abused, neglected, or indoctrinated behind closed doors hidden away from the group, treated as the private property of one or two adults who project themselves and all their unhealed shadow material onto the children. What might we consider doing differently, if we really care about people who grow up to be suicidal or transgressive? This is the elephant in the room of -so- many social ills we contend with which no one even thinks to look at.

The Church worships the nuclear family as some kind of God-given sacrament that is utter perfection. Millennia of king-priests, kings, and priests setting our standards for society have sunk in deep so that even the secular world still clings to what is largely a religious arrangement, which once served to help hold a more tenuous kind of society together (at a cost), but I think is, like childhood strategies developed to cope with trauma, now become dysfunctional for us as we continue to grow up. This is the sacred cow very few are willing to challenge, but it's all so obvious.

So, all this points to the desperate need for our society to deeply reconnect on the community level, to revalue the human being more than corporations, banks, the military, profit, property, and privilege. I think we are heading in this direction. People are sick, sad, and exhausted by business as usual. When collective values shift, entire paradigms and eras shift. It is time for another Renaissance, one based on the essential restoring of human value, including so many women and people of whichever ethnicities, which have been undervalued and devalued in the world, squandering our greatest natural resource: each other."

I often think of the squandered potential and lives of people who are in families that do not appreciate or love them and where they emotionally and otherwise do not belong. How many are suppressed just being born or adopted into the wrong group of people?  Suicide I believe is increasing because love and connection in the nuclear family is lacking for many.

In our consumerist society, families have become all about competition too, where the "winners" are worthy of love and care, and the "losers" are ostracized. I have seen this all over, my situation is extreme but know for a child not to be a "success" that often the relationship with the family is not a positive one. Our families have become nothing but competition clubs, who will win is top priority for too many out there.

What is sad, is in America, the nuclear family is gaining precedence.  One of my old IFB churches prided itself on being "family first" and that made me feel left out from the day I started there, because I did not have a family. In conservative circles, they push isolation and fear for the children, with homeschooling, so some kids are cut even more off from community or other people to give them information about the world. They can't have the kids knowing too much because then they may question the religion or the family system.

He is right that children have become more private property then people in themselves. There's so many places now, where people have turned their children into trophies where they are to be a reflection unto a family rather then people in their own right. How many young people can even manage to find themselves or who they are meant to be in a society that tells them their role is to be defined by their nuclear family forever more. My family hated me and made me the scapegoat but they also were a barrier to my desire to become an artist. I was mocked and told art was a waste of time. My intellectual and other interests were not respected. Conformity was the greatest good in my family.

I see 60-70 plus years old stuck in the roles and lives laid out by their families. What will the family think? Families can be like religions in themselves where people are told the world is this way, and don't dare question. I questioned my family like religion. Maybe I thought life should be more then breeding, I couldn't have children anyway. Maybe I thought life should not just be an exercise in conformity, misery and measuring up to narcissists where nothing was good enough anyway. I see young people being more and more crushed by their families, for the ones who are not 'good enough" trophies, mental illness and depression are growing. People are lonely out there and the nuclear family is not enough.