A Rallying Cry For Rebuilding Families

The first great March on Washington looked to government for solutions. This week’s march took the next step. It looked to individuals for solutions to problems that government alone could never solve.

Government, for example, makes a rotten father. Only a committed man can be a father, can create the environment required for children to flourish and society to survive.

This is not really a racial issue, although participants in the Million Man March on Monday in the nation’s capital called attention to the staggering, tragic fact that 65 percent of black children live in single-parent homes. It also ought to stagger us that 25 percent of white children live in single-parent homes.

Between 1900 and 1960, the proportion of all children in single-parent homes remained stable at about 9 percent - and many of those homes had been emptied by death, not divorce. But since then, as marriage and the family have collapsed, social ills have multiplied: child abuse, poverty, juvenile crime, academic mediocrity.

Families fail among Americans of all races and economic backgrounds and among religious people as well as the irreligious. Indeed, it is unfortunate that religious conservatives, who do recognize the role of personal values, have concentrated negative energies on homosexuals and abortion rather than on the closer-to-home how-to’s of establishing solid marriages and homes.

A movement of individual leadership, unlike anything the nation has seen before, is needed for fatherhood and families and children to recover from the social death spiral of the past 35 years.

The Promise Keepers movement shows a welcome reordering of priorities among religious conservatives. Rather than attacking other people’s shortcomings, it challenges men to fix the ills within their own control - beginning with their own marriages and families.

Monday’s Million Man March sent a similar message echoing throughout the nation, bracing all of us with the tonic of self-reliance, including those the largely white Promise Keepers movement didn’t reach.

Of course, it is true that many who need to embrace this message weren’t on hand Monday. But a message is going out - that ordinary men find something to celebrate and the watching nation finds something to applaud in committed fatherhood. We all have paid too much attention to males whose claim to fame is the ability to fire a gun, impregnate a girl, pitch a fastball or merge a corporation. We need to honor men who are determined to build a family, the cradle of civilization.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board