In This, There Must Never Be Have-Nots

On my seventh birthday, my sister, Elizabeth, gave me a book, as she had on my sixth. On the flyleaf she wrote “I love you.” I rushed off to show it to my parents and to the others in their bouquet of daughters - Bess, Rose, Ruth and Anne.

After I gobbled it up, I put the book among those the girls had collected with money they had earned, because although this book was mine, it was also part of the family.

Books, work and I love you. Family.

A lifetime later, on another birthday, I am still a member of that family of two parents, five daughters and a son, the youngest. Death could not destroy that family.

My father died when I was nearing 13. My mother and my sisters kept the family together, but something important helped.

In that working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, everybody had a family. In the cluster of apartment buildings, in school, on the street, in the park, families. So even with my father gone, I felt part of a whole universe of families, bereft but not outside.

Bess died. Then Elizabeth, and Ruth. All died in the fullness of their young adulthood. Later, Anne and my mother, Sarah. She would no longer have to bury her children.

The living family became only Rose, everlastingly so bright, and me, just two of us.

But to me she is still part of that bouquet. And I know that we are part of a family that is not two alone but eight together. That is not metaphysical but reality - not only our memories but the way we two think and act, what we have become, are all connected to that family, not as something that was but is, five daughters, one son, two parents.

My mind today is full of the other six members of that family. I think, too, about the fearful thing that has been happening in America, the destruction of so many families, and about children who never had a family at all.

How can that be? I feel personal terror. What would have become of me if I had not had the love, protection and rudder of a family? How can a society survive if it allows the destruction, or postulates the nonexistence in the future, of families of parents and children, the units around which all other social units have been built? It cannot - other than as a cold void.

So can we save family for those who have it only in remnant? Create it for those who have it not at all? Provide it for children yet unborn, so they do not emerge into the darkness of knowing only aloneness and the ultimate poverty of the absence of love?

I do not know how, nor anybody who does. But to give up searching for ways is not within the right of anybody who ever has known the family love and sustenance that lives beyond death.

That is what Colin Powell is saying, I believe. And that is why, although I think more promotion should await more results, the campaign for volunteerism and mentoring of children who need it should be supported in full heart. And I hope he accepts in full heart the warnings of Mario Cuomo that volunteerism must not become an excuse for snatching away government support to children in need or drifting away.

I do not for a minute think that volunteerism itself gives us the answer but that we must accept a number of ways - sophisticated government help plus volunteerism, not either/or. And we will have to look carefully into what we have supported in the past.

For instance, those of us who accepted sex education for birth and disease control must now examine, in a hurry, any evidence that sex education is becoming sex instruction, so vivid that it leads to more family-destroying teenage pregnancies, not fewer.

Read Chapter Five of “The Assault on Parenthood” by Dana Mack (Simon and Schuster) and decide whether you want your kindergartener to be taught how nice it feels when a penis is inserted into a vagina or a high school student taught details of how to prolong intercourse, whoever is on top. This is birth control? How do these kids go on to the next class?

Specialists instruct us that children must be taught the importance of education and the need to work. Strange, I cannot remember my mother or father “teaching” that. Living as family, we all just understood it, the eight of us - and we all still do.