One of the most vital, enduring and, more recently, VILIFIED institutions we have in this nation is the FAMILY.

Families and Freedom

By D.C. Wright
Thursday, August 27, 2009

One of the most vital, enduring and, more recently, VILIFIED institutions we have in this nation is the FAMILY. Families include parents, grandparents, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters, children, cousins, nieces and nephews and so on, ad infinitum.

For example, my family consisted of my grandparents on my mother’s side, occasional visits from my paternal grandmother and uncles and aunts, great aunts, my siblings (I grew up with seven brothers and six sisters; one sister passed away about ten or eleven years ago) and numerous cousins, all located within 45-50 miles of us. We were relatively tight, though my father’s kin were scattered about the country a good bit. My mother’s family was largely who was close by.

We lived in a rather large house owned by my maternal grandfather. He was rather crusty and curmudgeonly, but was a gentleman of the OLD school. He and my grandmother lived upstairs in that old house, my aunt (mom’s youngest sister) and her three kids (two boys and a girl) lived in the back of the upstairs, my mom’s older sister lived with her cats in a small apartment over the store that was part of the complex and was at varying times, a convenience store, ice creamery, pizza place and so forth. We had a large back yard where I and one of my cousins would play a lot… the small toy soldiers of the day in green plastic always got a good workout when we were younger. As we got a bit older, I recall that they started dying in various imaginative ways, depending on what stolen goodies we had that could either melt them or simply blow off limbs and body parts.

My uncle, mom’s only brother would come over every weekend and he and his oldest son would spend hours playing pinochle with Gramps. It was fairly idyllic in those days. WWII was well past, Korea was over and Eisenhower was President. We, as family, were pretty tight and there was precious little we wouldn’t do, one for the other. Oh, and as unusual as it was, we were not Catholic, though I got asked that often when the topic of family size came up. In fact, I was raised in the Baptist Church and still carry fond memories of our pastor, one of the later assistant pastors and a lot of the membership.
Franklin Roosevelt efforts to disrupt the family structure and create a dependency on government with his Social Insecurity program

Of course there were problems; NO family can exist without them. But my main point here is that families were, as late as the 1950s, the foundation on which this nation was built. True enough, during the 1930s and 1940s, efforts were made by the notorious Franklin Roosevelt to disrupt the family structure and create a dependency on government with his Social Insecurity program, which discouraged family cohesion, thrift and planning during a seriously bad time nationally, the Great Depression, Round One.

My wife comes from Jamaica. Her father made a name for himself from about his fourteenth birthday, when he had to strike out on his own. He became quite successful and raised essentially two families. The first was several sons and daughters from his first wife; after her death, he married my wife’s mother and raised about nine MORE kids, my wife being the first of this group. He had some strict rules for the family to follow, and under those guidelines he took GREAT care of them. He passed away right around my wife’s twentieth birthday, but to this day, the family is the foundation for Jamaicans, just as it used to be for us. And one other, VERY important point here: there are NO hyphenated Jamaicans. Even though you will find ancestries going back to India, China, Scotland, Germany, various African nations, England and so forth, they are all now ONE nationality: Jamaican, mon!

So, though there are socialists in Jamaica trying hard to ruin THEIR family structure, it seems that they are having less success than here. We have been in the “Progressiveâ€