There was an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about how the various subcultures in the U.S. affect economic success.
Maybe there’s nothing new here that common sense doesn’t reveal every day. The bulk of the references in the article were to Thomas Sowell (“soul”) a Black economist who is 95 this year and still sharp. He has lectured, berated, and warned the Black community for decades on the degradation of its culture as a significant cause of its economic and social woes.
Cultural degradation is apparent in the Italian American community as well as in American society in general. Old values that evolved through centuries of trial and error are being chucked not just eroded. The family unit, both nuclear and extended, has become less of a bulwark of survival.
How many TV news reports have I seen in which a single mom with three or four kids laments her dire needs. There’s never a husband or boyfriend in the scene, and the reporter doesn’t ask about that. Often, each child has a different “daddy.” I read of one child being raised by his great-grandmother! She was only in her 40s, her daughter and granddaughter had been unwed also as teens. This happens to White women as well as Black. One source had these stats for 2018: on average 39.6% of births in the United States were out-of-wedlock. For blacks, the number is 69.4%; for American Indians/Alaska Natives 68.2%; for Hispanics 51.8%; for whites 28.2%; and for Asian Americans 11.7%.
So, marriage is not a perquisite for 40% of American mothers. I choose to believe that Italian American young women, at least those with a modicum of our cultural values, do not make up any significant part of this statistic. Out-of-wedlock births pave the road to poverty. They require more dependence on government welfare, which fosters more “baby-daddys.”
Consumer and student debt are also becoming a norm that chips away at the American Dream. Most of us who had Italian immigrant families know it was always pay-as-you-go. Dining out, costly vacations, pricy cars, and rip-off colleges were things they avoided. Today, debt is like the plague; if you don’t have it now you might catch it marrying the “love of your life.” American consumer debt is $18.4 Trillion! Student debt is $1.6 Trillion. Yet, another excuse to avoid marriage.
This road to perdition is made worse by legacy and social media. When did you ever see a news special on our cultural collapse? Everything else is sealing our doom. Climate change is an existential threat, as are immigration crackdowns, tariffs, and petroleum. But entire generations scrapping the cultural values of millennia is not a topic of concern or conversation.
I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of the old days either. There were unwed mothers, but shamefully so. The Blue Laws might have saved families from spending lots of money at malls, but they removed the fun of window shopping on Sundays. Six-hour Sunday dinners kept extended families humming but they put the kibosh on a beach day or road trip. Family get togethers today require airline tickets. Three TV channels and indoor antennas were the pits but didn’t drain the budget like cable does today.
Admittedly, technology has truly made us happier. Unfortunately, our culture hasn’t adapted well to it. Our young children are absorbed in the wrong things, glued as they are to iPad screens. Teens and young adults are becoming more products of the internet than of the families that produced them. The cost of living has gone to the absurd as outsized birthday parties, Sweet Sixteen bashes, Reveal parties, bachelor/bachelorette getaways, and destination weddings have become costly parodies of the rich and famous. More debt is the price of these new traditions.
The only solution to this downhill spiral is to raise the issues often. It seems that the media have gone overboard in praising single motherhood and the debilitating Black subculture that Thomas Sowell has repeatedly condemned. Debt has become a government problem rather than an individual one.
As for us, we need to keep our impressionable young from mimicking the patterns of the media culture and degraded subcultures. No easy task. ‒JLM
It took Italian Americans a leap decade or two to finally realize that education was the way out of cultural stasis and poverty. Within one generation, they caught up to other ethnicities in terms of wealth and opportunity, mimicking the hard work ethic of their immigrant forebears. Where will this lead? As you point out, no one knows.
Though now a (happily) retired high-school educator, I still keep my toes in the profession by substituting at a local suburban, middle-class high school. I’m pleased, thus far, to see Italian American students adhering to middle-class values.
They’re on their phones as much as anyone but are also, I’ve noticed, more gregarious than most students. They are likewise more polite and respectful.