Sitting Ducks
Uprootedness and our divorce from normal, human communities has left us, and our families, vulnerable.
Apologies for another voice typed piece, working against the odds here and editing best I can!:
A few words are needed on just how easily we have been destabilized, and how drastic these attacks have been on the American family. I'm personally not a believer in the sole sanctity of the nuclear family, and generally feel it's the loss of extended family and the close knit communities of which they are a part that has done the damage and left us vulnerable to the various agendas that have been marketed to us. In fact, much of my opposition to both feminism and what I often call “therapy culture” is really a reaction against the loss of those strong, powerful extended families for a culture that extols only the value of doing the work of natural human networks on your own–or pathologizing your sense of loss if you’re not up to the task. Yet it’s more than this. We’ve discounted every foundation our forebears had to offer and presumed something better could take their places at our infinite peril.
For several years now, I have frequented a nearby park that offers both a lake and plentiful amounts of both geese and ducks. The Canada geese form their usual large flocks and rather obnoxious flocks, with goslings carefully (sometimes viciously) guarded after their arrival each spring. It’s not an unusual sight to see people walking or jogging the track chased by an angry, protective goose or two. As the months roll by, those goslings all grow to adolescence, then early adulthood. By stark contrast, the ducks are always paired off, male and female. Their ducklings also arrive each spring, smaller and more adorable, swimming along in neat rows while Mama Duck carefully tends them. Yet within a few months, those ducks’ offspring are generally whittled down to 1-2, their survival rate dismal in a park filled with natural predators and without a large flock to adequately protect them. Sometimes couples are left with none at all. After 4 years of watching this progression, it’s always the same. The large, protective communities of geese and those seemingly grieving duck couples. While I am likely anthropomorphizing a bit too much here, I still find the comparison from my daily routine apt enough.
“The fir tree withers that stands on the farmstead, neither bark nor needles to protect it; So it is with the man whom no one loves. How should he live for long?” Havamal Stanza 50, From the Poetic Edda (Old Norse, trans. Dr. Jackson Crawford)
A great many of our problems stem from this uprootedness that occurred in the post WWII boom of both affluence and modernity. The gradual shift to a more white collar economy and driveable, convenience oriented single family home suburbs. The universities were already in thrall to the postmodernists and a rapidly expanding middle class was readying to send their flocks in droves. An update to the American dream, higher paying jobs that required both a degree and a commute. A shift to more isolated homes in newly built suburbs, closer to urban centers and the office, and these more isolated nuclear families are key here. With more freedom comes more responsibility, it is said, but whoever popularized that platitude left off loneliness. They also didn’t understand that societies sink or swim via the cultural consensus, and you can’t expect a code of functional personal responsibility when it’s being asked of those bearing it in relative isolation.
I’ve long found the “collectivist vs. individualism” argument rather tedious, to be honest, and the long miring of American conservatism in the latter side has proven a detriment. In the long run, it caused a cognitive dissonance equal to that of the lenses of the left, so intent on reframing our reality along lines few can now even recognize (postmodernism/deconstruction→agnostisicm→sexual revolution—>feminism→eventually transgenderism, it’s a tower with no foundation*). I generally agree with consensus on the right that our culture is swinging too heavily towards participation trophies and the world of therapy, the argument being* that this is damaging our ability to be self-reliant. Yet this is precisely the problem; you can’t preach eternal self reliance and then criticize those who sink instead of swim in a radically new sea of suburban sprawl. People who don’t even know their cousins (if they have any) yet would’ve been surrounded by them just a generation or two ago. Nor can you stand by the position that we all operate entirely on our own steam, free from societal influence while arguing that society is making a leftward drift that’s undermining our previous collective national identity.
That’s just not how cultures work, and a lot of the culture wars have been so much sniping over how to adequately accept the radical changes in our environment served up by the 20th century. This is where modern liberal feminism begins, where the arguments also began to break down even as they began; Friedan arguing that suburban isolation and mass marketing were the culprits, cutting women off from the opportunities and family they’d been previously surrounded by. She wasn’t entirely wrong on that count, but she took a radically Marxist left turn*** (and took “feminism” with it) in reframing this entire issue around oppression dynamics. This is, after all, the woman who described the institution of marriage in suburban homes as a “comfortable concentration camp”. We’ve suffered ever since.
This shift to isolation proved to be the very petri dish that led to the cultural revolution (and its many isms) of the late 1960s. But also for every other ism following, because sitting alone in an increasingly turbulent sea of influential ideologies, including the full assault of the insidious modern feminist movement. We’re so bereft of our missing flocks that we often cannot put our finger on the problem, and we’ve been trained to ignore our instincts and instead rationalize and deconstruct. To empathize and view the world through the lens of relativism until we embody the old maxim “if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything”.
Americans have become a people in search of our roots, religion, roles and homes. The smaller towns my grandmothers both hailed from, and those who filled them, were a window to the world as we used to know it, a more grounded world of roots and faith. The world I felt slipping away as a child, these elders born from 1890-1920. These women weren’t bitter, generally they were respected as elders and surrogate aunts. They were threads in a shared fabric, one that made us all whole. None of these women carried some invisible weight of oppression, in stark contrast to so many liberals of the Boomer generation (their children and grandchildren). Many (if not most) had careers, but if they felt any gnawing need for a salary it wasn’t out of fear of “slavery to a man” but from the lingering sting of the Great Depression. No, I’m not arguing that women “knew their place”, but that they had places to begin with, and places of both opportunity and respect.
From small towns to high society in larger cities, from those who knew horrible tragedies to those counting themselves lucky in everything, there was always little variance. Every tale of the “old days” involved a routine of visits to front porches, churches, picnics, of towns (or city blocks) coming together after deaths in the family. Women had achieved suffrage decades before without starting a cottage industry of grievance and an avalanche of misandry. Had we remained in these communities, these protective flocks, what would we be today? We certainly wouldn’t be sitting ducks for every institutional wrecking ball that has been trotted down the road.
This is what it means to be raised by wolves. It matters little if this was by design or simply that this system is easily exploited by those seeking to profit, it has happened, and a societal obsession with individualism is rapidly losing ground to a totalitarian new collectivism. One divorced from centuries of human knowledge and wedded to the notion that the knowledge of 20th century social scientists supersedes them all. Taught to value perpetual deconstruction, the dogma that biological difference between the sexes is inherently discriminatory, and finally that men can give birth. That Christianity is invalid because its validity would invalidate the truths of others, and therefore cannot exist in the postmodernist framework of paradoxes. That a 2000 year institution should be rebranded as “patriarchal” and “bigoted”.
We’ve been taught to suppress and subvert our own gut instincts on almost every possible matter and to vilify every flock still trying to welcome us in. From the church to the demonization of masculinity and the concurrent notion that we need no tapestry of community whatsoever. The worship of the foreign against the decades-long war on white, American Christian men. Arguably, also black and Hispanic Christian men. We’re taught to walk right up to predators while denigrating those who would traditionally keep us safe (See the “I choose the bear” controversy). Each ridiculous lens a new stumbling block that moves us to the lone duck category, ducks clinging to the very postmodernist frameworks and that have left us unable to tend our little flocks.
For those who try to still steer our (now much attenuated) broods, the efforts by the new society to intervene is now so persistent as to make the endeavor nearly impossible. Whether it’s a left -infiltrated school system or a group of relatives, all it really takes in the real world is a lack of consensus on very fundamental challenges to reality presented by newer ideologies to lose your flock. Take the covid vax and gender ideology as just two examples. How many parents were called bigoted, anti-science quacks in the past decade for any hint of opposition? Radical conspiracy theorists? We had to watch as our youth bought into these ideas while accepting the monstering of opposition. The creation of a rather massive, modern and easily controlled flock.
It matters little, again, if this was by design or merely the result of a shift towards white collar convenience and affluence. The question now is how to repair the damage. How to rebuild the flocks and weather the storms on our heads by those who’ll rebrand such an effort radical, white supremacist, bigotry and Christofascism. Many in smaller towns who suffered no such divorce from basic human truths may wonder what on earth is wrong with the generations of Americans who grew up in “transplant suburbs”. But many of us who were cut off are seeking to rebuild, and to do so before it’s too late.
* The flow chart of postmodernist lenses is something I often expound on in other essays, few finished for publication as of now, but in short here we have been expected to accept an increasingly bizarre tower without a foundation. A set of lenses that are rather contrary to natural human society and which, once stacked onto someone’s eyes renders them incapable of any normal function, which is precisely why we now have blue haired hysterical women screaming that Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are heroes to the trans community and abortion is a sacrament as well as a safeguard against a religious patriarchy.
We were asked to accept radical agnosticism and disavowing of Christianity, the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation feminism that followed, abortion (late 1960s-70s). Once this wave was digested somewhat, we were thrown (1990s) the more organized gay rights movement, racial identity politics and political correctness. Gay marriage normalization, gender identity, the antiracism decolonization movement followed. While these are all outgrowths of the same original monster, a natural progression, they’ve functioned in on a societal level as lenses we’re forced to view the world through.
Lenses that CAN come off, like so much brainwashing. Every single person entrenched in these beliefs can be offboarded back to normalcy. It’s still imperative to see these layers for what they are.
**I was here thinking of Christian Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel’s 2005 book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance. It’s a fabulous read, and to my point above, it’s interesting to watch a thorough takedown of “therapy culture” from 2005 (Satel is a practicing psychiatrist, so this is from a critic of her own field) be devoid of reference to gender affirming care. It’s simply absent, the lens had yet to be applied. Yet the authors often divert to the individualism/collectivist approach even while decrying the cultural shift that generally undercuts the individualist argument. Still a book I highly recommend, and one with numerous used, cheap copies available online.
***I have been struggling with vision issues that left me unable to check my sources and didn’t take this essay where I perhaps wanted to. After a reread (at long last) of The Feminine Mystique it’s quite clear that Friedan exploited a situation, the precise situation I describe above, for her own aims of restructuring and reordering society by selling the notion of the war between the sexes. Of introducing the oppression dynamics she was so enamored with (her Marxism was hardly a secret) to a vulnerable society, which puts this essay into a rather different light and one I will be revisiting shortly. Mea culpa for throwing out a voice typed piece of lesser quality, I didn’t foresee a remedy to the reading issue coming so soon.