From: noraa@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Subject: Why Cities Burn
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 02:50:56 GMT

by Asa Baber

I really like John McLaughlin.  He is a crusty, amusing, tough-minded
man with an ability to laugh at himself.  He is also one of the few
hosts on national TV that understands the problems that men face today
in this culture.

I was a guest on *John McLaughlin's One on One* last May.  I got on one
of my favorite topics and said, "I believe that until we stop
separating fathers from their children, we are going to have a society
in which we burn down our cities and have muggings in the streets.  The
only answer to these problems is to bring fathers back into the
community."  (This, let the record show, was ten days before Dan Quayle
blamed Murphy Brown for the burning of Los Angeles.)

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of our urban ills are as
follows:  chronic unemployment, drug consumption and merchandising,
police brutality, racial strife, a breakdown in law and order, miserly
government funding, redlining by banks and real estate developers,
citizen disinterest, cultural myopia and economic depression.

An incident occurs, a population explodes, a city burns, a city is
looted, a city tries to recover, a postmortem is held and the usual
analyses and explanations are paraded before us.  Some action is taken,
some money is handed out, some government grants and bank loans are
restructured.   There is a fuss.  Briefly.  But inevitably, the media
lose interest, and life in the mean streets goes back to "normal."

The reason the problem of urban violence has not been effectively
addressed, my fellow Americans, is that the single most important cause
of urban unrest is usually ignored.

The deepest and most pernicious cause of our widespread national agony
is the disappearance of fathers and mentors from the community.  We
have allowed fathers to become expendable in their children's lives,
and we are paying dearly for our cavalier attitude.

You will find millions of dollars allocated to rebuild businesses and
clean up city streets.  But you will find no significantly funded
programs designed to bring fathers and mentors back into the
community.  The megabucks go for window dressing, not radical
rethinking.

For the moment, consider what a negative impact the absent father has
on his sons.  In the introduction to my recently published collection
of *Men* columns (_Naked at the Gender Gap_), I wrote the following
about the universal need for fathers and mentors:

"When a young man grows up without valid mentors, when he is deserted
and misled and abandoned, he is placed in a terrible psychological
limbo.  He is basically left without definition as a man.  He remains
uninitiated, uninformed, and lost in confusion, sometimes for his
entire life.  He also remains angry and embittered, feeling he has been
cheated by the men he depended on."

There you have it.  When the father is expendable, when he is
disposable and disrespected, when his vital and necessary role in the
growth of his children is unacknowledged, young men (and, I believe,
young women, too) become rebellious.  They yearn to burn.  They carry
within their hearts what seems to be limitless anger.

What can we do?  The following agenda will seem either incendiary or
foolish to some of you.  But I assure you that I mean every word of
it.

We must change our child support and custody laws.  We must signify
that the father-child relationship is sacred and that the state cannot
step in and abolish it.  We must have a better understanding of the
pressures a father faces, and we must reconstruct our social contract
so that he is encouraged -- not forbidden -- to see his children and be
involved with them.

One day, I hope, the following practices will be common in our
culture:

     1. *Joint custody.*  The state will admit that it cannot declare
	fathers null and void.  Unless proved abusive or derelict in a
	court of law, the father will always retain full parental
	rights in the eyes of the state.  From the beginning, the
	father-child relationship will be considered sacred under the
	law.

     2. *No strings access.*  There will be a certain number of days
	per week in which a father may be with his children.  No
	strings, no conditions, no excuses.  The children cannot be
	withheld from him at this time.  He is their father.  He has a
	right to be with them.  Period.  If there are disputes over
	child support payments or other issues, they are not reason
	enough to bar the father from seeing his children on these
	special days.

     3. *Accountable use of child support payments.*  The state will
	spend as much energy ensuring that child support payments are
	being responsibly used by the mother as it will in pursuing the
	father for those payments.  And the father will be given
	evidence of that accounting.  He will not simply hand over his
	money to someone he may not trust to be spent without his
	knowledge.

     4. *Enforced cooperation.*  If games are played with these
	arrangements and if fathers are barred from reasonable time
	with their children, the state will be vigorous in supporting
	the fathers' rights to have access to their kids.

     5. *Definition of reasonable time.*  This is the most important
	element in the revised legal code.  Instead of assuming that a
	fathers' importance to his children's growth is minimal, the
	law will finally acknowledge that the father is crucial to a
	healthy child, family and community.  Fathers will be awarded
	maximum time with their kids.

If and when we reach these conditions, we will have a healthier and
safer society, and we will have taken one giant step toward our
survival as a people.  If we continue to ignore this issue, our cities
will burn and our culture will die.

The choice is ours.

Source; *Playboy* Magazine, September 1992

Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
TR@CBNEA.ATT.COM 
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