Writing in the Detroit News about the latest rash of shootings in the city (nine dead and 20 injured), Luther Keith asks, “Haven’t we been around this track before?” Yes, actually. He lays out a list of measures to address the crime problem including some predictable (police, gun buybacks, recreational programs) and, refreshingly, something more promising, more powerful: “Emphasize personal responsibility. It all comes down to choices — right ones and wrong ones, good ones and bad ones and the willingness not just to say “no more,” but the willingness to do something about it.”
Keith’s opinion piece appears on a day when the Drudge Report has linked stories about widespread gun mayhem in New York and Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. For decades, often after a tragic shooting involving the death or deaths of children, church leaders and community activists have taken to the streets to demand that something be done about crime and public disorder. Yet there are no quick fixes. This is the hard work of cultural change that takes years and years and cannot be accomplished with snap solutions from politicians. That’s because, as Anthony Bradley wrote in his Acton commentary on flash mob violence, the rot has gone deep:
An ailing American culture is responsible for this spectacle. In a society that does not value forming young people in the way of prudence, justice, courage, self-control, and the like, why should we be surprised that convenience stores are being robbed by youthful mobs? In a society that does not value private property and fosters a spirit of envy and class warfare through wealth redistribution, why should we be surprised that young people don’t value someone else’s property? Radical individualism and moral relativism define the ethics of our era and criminal flash mobs expose our progressive failure.
The Church does have an important role to play in effecting this cultural change, as an institution still at work in big cities dedicated to the shaping of a rightly ordered moral conscience and public virtue. Here’s a new video from FOCUS North America, the Orthodox Christian ministry to the poor. Its ReEngage program has created the “The Man Class” to help men understand what exactly it means to be a man, something not so obvious as it turns out. Here’s “Man Class” facilitator Rodney Knott:
In the absence of men that has occurred over the last 30 years, the definition of manhood has slowly eroded and been perverted. Let us be clear, this is not an indictment against the many single mothers who struggle mightily to raise their sons. But what we are expecting them to do is impossible.
There have never been any cultures, tribes or societies that have allowed or expected its women to train up their men. But that is exactly what is taking place in our society today. We are created male and female. We learn to be men and women. In the absence of teachers, how will we learn these lessons? It takes a man to teach a boy how to be a man.
Bravo, FOCUS.
