The Obama presidential campaign released a snazzy slideshow of a faceless composite woman named “Julia” and how her life would be helped, from age 3 to age 67, if Barack Obama is re-elected.
As I was reading the “Julia” promo, I was extremely saddened by something that’s neither economic nor gender-based, but entirely social. “Julia” (and thus, Democrat Party’s Ideal Citizen) is the world’s loneliest woman.
There is no mention of her family and friends, no social groups who gather around her in times of need, to encourage or help her as she has to go into the dangerous mysterious surgery of her college years.
She has no parents who prepare her for Kindergarten, instead relying on the Nanny State to give her a mass-produced “Head Start”. She has no teachers who inspire her, no friends who encourage her, no church to assist her. There is no loving husband beside her as she walks through pregnancy, no children or grandchildren to pick up her prescriptions in her twilight years, not even a trusted advisor to help her save for retirement.
“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” an article in the Atlantic from a couple of weeks ago, that was ironically shared widely on social networks, begins with a discussion of the familiar “who really knows all their Facebook friends” question, and quickly heads into harder-hitting territory:
“As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.”
I find this fascinating. How many of these mental-health workers are government employees, I wonder, and how much of “Julia”s life and heartache has to be taken directly to purchased compassion in a white coat instead of the traditional safety nets of healthy families and societies?
The article gets more chilling:
“We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family.”
Our self-absorption and disintegration has much to do with the ins and outs of acquiring government hand-outs. Unwed mothers earn more assistance with no father in the home, retirees no longer have to save for retirement or plan for the future, people no longer believe that they have a duty to take care of their parents or even prepare their own children for schooling, life and professions. We don’t pass on generational wisdom any more, because trades are scoffed at, hard work is undervalued and parents have been ousted as the influencer over their children, replaced by Big Government.
“Julia” is not a propaganda piece. She is the terrifying reality of a lonely, helpless future – one in which our husbands and fathers are castrated and marginalized, our social constructs are replaced by the lines at the DMV and our self-sufficiency is watered down to a mere memory.
“Julia” is a lonely future, and one that I, as the kind of woman voter Obama seems to be going for with this campaign, am unwilling to accept.
Indeed!
And who would want to live like that??