During the recent and well-deserved hubbub about the government policy which separated parents from their children because of immigration issues, my friend Les Yoder posted the following comment and statistics, all of which bear repeating.
I appreciated the statements that both Franklin Graham and Steve Colbert have made about the separating of minor children from their parents at the border. Then my thoughts wandered to the broader picture of separating children from parents.
Over half of people in both state & federal prisons are parents of minor children.
On any given day, there are nearly 428,000 children in foster care in the United States.
In the USA – there are at least 2266 divorces each and every day. (827,261 divorces were reported from 44 states & DC in 2016.)
43% of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers.
About 50% all USA children will witness the breakup of a parent’s marriage. Of these children, close to half will also see the breakup of a parent’s second marriage.
Les is on to something here.
We much prefer to get all hot and bothered about an issue that is going on out there somewhere that raises our sense of injustice. But when we’re participating in an element of the problem, we’re not nearly so interested in talking about it. We’d prefer not to be implicated because we’d prefer not to change.
Yes, our government has been behaving badly in the way we treat Mexican families. But we as a culture are behaving badly in far more entrenched ways that we ignore because we don’t want to change.
As much as we want to think of ourselves as a country that loves and cares for children, the facts tell a different story. We are continually pulling families apart and leaving children to suffer the consequences.
It’s good to get on our high horse about immigration injustices. They need to change. But as long as we’re on that high horse, let’s tackle some other ways we participate in anti-family injustices.