A thought on family breakdown and short-sighted policies

Last week I ran into two college addresses that challenged people to think about policy in light of future generations.

One was written from a primarily environmental perspective, and delivered to the graduating class of the University of Portland. If you are into pigeon-holing, it was the more "liberal" of the two. h/t Steve Sanford, Chancellor of the Diocese of South Dakota, who shared it by email as a reflection on this bidding from the Prayers of the People (Rite I):

Open, O Lord, the eyes of all people to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works, that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, they may honor thee with their substance, and be faithful stewards of thy bounty.

The other, which you can call more "conservative," was on health care and presented at a leadership conference put on by Hillsdale College. h/t Sarah Hey of Stand Firm in Faith. It also sounded a call to wise stewardship of resources, with some sobering statistics on the burden that will fall on our kids and grand kids if we don't.

Whatever merits or flaws you find in the two addresses, both share a concern for the future and the generations that will live it out.

The disintegration of both nuclear and even extended families, primarily through cultural approval of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, poses a significant challenge to the development of forward looking policy. When short term gratification of individual needs is paramount and, despite all kinds of evidence, the negative impact on children is ignored, it is hard to see how appeals to the well being of future generations can gain traction, at least with the old Baby Boomers now holding power in most institutions and occupations. As the address in Portland puts it,

You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence.

In a challenging book called Death of the Church, Mike Regele & Mark Schulz lay out a model of social change based on generational cycles. As you might guess without much research, those of us in the Baby Boom generation are in the phase of the cycle that makes a mess. Those following us will likely be a generation that cleans it up, with much pain, sacrifice and creativity.