Crime is in the news a lot lately, particularly violent crime. There is just too much of it.
Of course, nobody knows why any of this is happening, so we
have to call in the experts, so they can tell us.
I think life is a lot less complicated than that, and I
think the experts are getting it wrong for the most part.
A recent letter to a newspaper captured this clearly. The writer says, and I’m sure the experts
will agree, that “the unacceptable level of crime in our city is due to many factors:
poverty and equity, low employment opportunities in under-resourced neighborhoods,
high dropout rates and tension between law enforcement and those communities.”
Apart from the high dropout rates, everything is somebody
else’s fault. Maybe the high dropout
rates are somebody else’s fault too.
If only our government had spent billions of more dollars in
certain communities, if only we had given poor people more money so they wouldn’t
be poor anymore, if only selfish employers, or the government, had made more
jobs in certain neighborhoods, if only the police were nicer people, then
people wouldn’t resort to crime. They
would be happy and content and wouldn’t want to shoot anybody anymore.
No, people resort to crime and violence, because they have
no sense of right and wrong. Usually that
requires a belief in God, Somebody who sees and knows everything and who holds
people accountable for their actions.
But even prior to that, it’s a value system that says that certain
things are just wrong.
Many times in my life I have had to figure out what to do about
something, and there were always a number of options that were never
considered. Because they were
wrong.
When you have no sense of right and wrong, then wrong things
become options, and when things are options, we can find reasons to do
them. Even random, spontaneous violence
or crime happens, because a person previously had permitted violence or crime
as a viable option for certain situations.
As long as crime and violence are somebody else’s fault, we
will never solve them. We will never
feel like society, or somebody else, is doing enough as long as there is high crime.
But nobody can say that I am not responsible for what I did,
and society needs to affirm that. Prosecutors
must hold them accountable. There are no
acceptable mitigating circumstances for a crime of violence.
The cure for crime and violence is parenting. That means a husband and wife in a loving
relationship and raising their own children.
Of course, there are exceptions. Of course, there are bad parents. Of course, there are parents that fail. But having a child’s natural parents in a loving
home is still the best program we have with the highest success rate.
This is not a slight to gay couples. It’s just that only one member of a gay couple
can be a child’s natural parent. I am talking
ideally here. As much as possible, we should
want children to be raised by both of their natural parents. They are most likely to be the most loving,
committed parents to that child.
What are parents, but fulltime mentors, caregivers,
supporters, educators, tutors, individualized support systems for each child? And most parents find that that child creates
a love for them they didn’t expect and didn’t know before.
Whether you believe in God or evolution, they both ended up
at the same place. Children are the
result of a mutual biological act that creates new life. Children prosper best when they have the benefit
of both parents together in their lives.
And all this is at no cost to the public treasury.
It used to be a shame in our society for an unwed woman to
become pregnant and have a child. Now it
is often celebrated. We don’t want anybody to feel shame for their
actions, like they might have made a bad choice.
Our schools encourage children to become sexually active at very
young ages. They don’t teach that sex is
something that is meant for marriage yet alone families, or even that marriage
is something they might want for their lives.
Sex, yes, marriage, who knows?
As a society, we should encourage families. They are the foundation of a society. The smallest building blocks. Every new member has two fulltime adult
mentors to show them how to live. There
is no better solution.
The problem, of course, is that encouraging marriage, families,
and parenting won’t solve today’s crime problems. It’s the best answer to solve the future problems
but not today’s.
Whatever else you want to do to make society a better place,
you need to enforce the rules. There
must be consequences for those who commit crime. Without that, all those other answers won’t
change anything.
