Beyond Peace (32 page)

One way or another, this, or something close to it, is the basic direction in which we must go if we seriously intend to cure the cancer that is eating at America's cities and destroying its families. Young males should be made to discover that they cannot go on impregnating young females willy-nilly without personal consequences. Young females should be made to discover that their own irresponsibility will no longer be subsidized. The family must be restored as the basic social unit for the rearing of children. We must create powerful social pressures toward restoring to children the right to have fathers as well as mothers.

Welfare will not truly be reformed until the taxpayers who pay for it rise up and demand reform, and until they make crystal clear that by reform they mean no longer having their own pockets picked ever more insistently in order to enable ever more deadbeats to decide whether they find it more agreeable to go on welfare than to work. Irving Kristol encapsulated the principle: “The general rule has to be: If it is your own behavior that could land you on welfare, then you don't get it, or get very little of it . . . . It is crueler to entice people into the blind alley of welfare, where their humanity is dissipated and degraded, than to sternly warn them off.”

With the end of the Cold War we know freedom from the fear of war. What most Americans want more than anything else from their government today is freedom from the fear of crime. And yet we live in a culture of violence and of fear. Random acts of viciousness plague our streets and our homes. Six people are shot dead on the Long Island Rail Road by a man armed with a gun and an all-consuming racial hatred. Polly Klass, a twelve-year-old girl, is kidnapped from her bedroom and killed by a man with a rap sheet longer than the Mississippi River. Metal detectors are scanning students for weapons. There is no longer a sense of sanctuary anywhere. Millions of Americans are afraid to walk the streets or to use their parks. Since the 1960s the rate of violent crime has increased by a staggering 560 percent. In 1992 alone, fourteen million serious crimes were reported to the police. Millions more went unreported. In New York City, the number-one cause of workplace deaths is murder; two thirds of those killed at work there in 1992 were victims of homicides. To our international shame, Washington, D.C., has the highest murder rate of any capital city in the world.

Our criminal justice system has abysmally failed to deliver what should be the first freedom: freedom from fear. Young thugs openly thumb their noses at a system that operates a revolving door, often sending those who get caught back out onto the streets at a rate that clearly carries the message that crime does pay. But the more fundamental problem is the social corrosion that creates the criminals in the first place: the breakdown of value structures, the lack of discipline, the absence of any sense of right and wrong among many young Americans, particularly in those inner-city slums that are the breeding grounds—in both senses of the term—of so much of the mindless violence.

An understandable wish to avoid appearing racist, and to avoid offending minority voters, prevents most political leaders
from addressing the question of race as it affects the crime epidemic and in its many other dimensions. This cultural gag order must be lifted if the United States is to overcome the centrifugal forces of fear and envy that threaten to tear it apart. What is truly racist is to avoid addressing the problems of black America for the sake of avoiding offending people's sensibilities.

We cannot effectively address our nation's most pervasive social problems unless we face up to the fact that the urban underclass, where the breakdown of the family is worst, is primarily responsible for the plagues of violent crime and drug abuse on the streets of our great cities. Blacks are not the only members of this underclass, but they are the largest proportion of it. In 1992, half of all murder victims in the United States were black. Ninety percent were killed by other blacks. There can be no more dramatic evidence of a culture's deficiencies of values, discipline, and hope than when it turns against itself, as elements of urban America have in recent years.

The cop-out of blaming crime on poverty is morally corrupt and intellectually vacuous. When I was growing up during the Depression, there was far more poverty but far less crime. The difference was that our families and communities enforced civilized standards. We now are reaping the whirlwind stirred up by an age in which the self-appointed cultural elites sneered at the standards that helped people overcome the problems diversity can bring rather than wallow in them.

Arsonists, looters, muggers, and rioters burn, rob, and brutalize not because they are poor but because they are rotten. As Eric Hoffer has noted, “If poverty were indeed the fundamental cause of crime, history would be about almost nothing else, for the vast majority of people in world history have lived in poverty.” Today's vicious young predators show only cold-blooded contempt for their victims. They kill not for food but for a pair of fancy sneakers. They have to be shown firmly, determinedly, and relentlessly that we will not compromise in our defense of civilized standards and values. These are not negotiable.

Another harsh but uncomfortable reality is that many of these young Americans are virtually beyond hope. A collapsed bridge can be replaced, an unsafe building torn down. But human infrastructure is not subject to quick fixes, despite the routine wheedlings of the professional povertarians, who seize on any outbreak of violence as a pretext to plead for more public funds for themselves. Continuing to take seriously these pious proclamations, frequently wrapped in threats of “long hot summers” of violence if the payoffs are not made, is not an answer to the problem but an avoidance of the problem.

To renew America, we must resolve as a matter of national policy that another lost generation will not take to the streets at the beginning of the next century. But that does not mean the federal government should take the lead role. It should never be forgotten that government helped spark the crisis by fostering a climate of dependency that still hangs over our cities. It can best right its wrong by cutting the deficit, reducing the size of government, and building a strong, growing economy so everyone in urban America who is willing to work has the opportunity to do so.

The other answer can be found inside these urban communities themselves—in the homes, the churches, the community associations, the nonprofit sector, and, where a carefully circumscribed role can be fashioned, the government. Human beings gathered into sophisticated social groupings with their own values and rules long before the welfare office and the Department of Health and Human Services opened for business. If tomorrow night, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, a man raises his hand to strike his neighbor and then lowers it again, it will not be because Congress passed a poverty program. It will be because his heart told him he should, an impulse that more likely than not was informed by a caring mother, father, or spiritual leader who took the time, free of charge, to teach him the difference between right and wrong.

To their great credit, responsible black leaders are facing up
to the problem.
Washington Post
correspondent William Raspberry, from whom I received very constructive counsel when we met in the Oval Office, writes courageously, “The essence of black America's problem today is behavioral and only black Americans can do anything about it. The leadership in curbing black-on-black crime, redeeming our communities, and rescuing our children must be ours.”

Racism remains a major problem in America. Most legal barriers between the races have been torn down, but powerful psychological ones remain. Many suburban whites are understandably frightened by what they see in the cities. Many members of minority groups are understandably resentful when whites are better off. Crime in the cities and the gap between rich and poor cannot be voted out of existence by Congress; each will shrink only as the economy grows. In the meantime, political, religious, and cultural leaders of all backgrounds have the responsibility to dampen the impulses of fear and envy that can fuel racism and to remind their constituencies that America can be renewed only by the common pursuit of freedom and equality that made America great.

Regrettably, some black leaders today endorse a neosegre-gationist line that could spark new interracial resentments and turn a new generation of black young people away from America. The extent of the new separate-but-equal movement on some campuses is so ridiculous that even a popular liberal comic-strip artist felt obliged to lampoon it in a series of drawings. Civil rights leaders who fought and died for their cause in the 1960s would wonder if it had been worth it to see separate dining-room tables and separate dormitories for whites and blacks. Any leader who is dismayed, as everyone should be, at the way ancient ethnic hatreds have brought brutal violence and suffering to the former Yugoslavia should want to do everything in his power to prevent ours from being the era in which such numbing hatreds take hold in America.

As our nation's minority populations grow, greater efforts
must be made in schools, churches, and other organizations to encourage a sense of national unity. It is fine to promote minority studies, for instance, but it is dangerously wrong to teach that studying the dominant culture is illegitimate. Scholars at our most prestigious universities argue with a straight face that European history, even though it is part of the continuum that resulted in the establishment of the United States, has nothing to say to America's black, Latino, or Asian students. And yet we need only consider a prominent black such as General Colin Powell to see that in this country—where skin color and national origin are supposed to be utterly irrelevant in determining a person's status—it is quintessentially American for a member of a minority group, even a man from a poor neighborhood in the South Bronx, not only to embrace the dominant culture but to become his era's most celebrated defender of it.

The new separate-but-equal doctrine is just as despicably racist as the old-fashioned one, the new color bar just as insidious as the old. We seldom see Serbian-Americans lobbying for Serbian studies at the expense of Plato, or Italian-Americans saying that it is wrong to consider George Washington the father of their country since he did not come from Sicily. But minority-culture lobbyists say that blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans should venerate their own political and historical antecedents rather than “dead white males.”

It is essential that all people have the opportunity to study their own roots, which make our national tree so strong. But those who say that skin color alone entitles minority groups to an alternative set of national icons strike at the heart of what it means to be an American. In coming from other places to participate in our vast continuing experiment, our miraculous community of immigrants, Americans enter into a special kind of social contract. Being American is not about being white and Christian, or black and Muslim, or Asian and Buddhist. It is about being dedicated to a country that in principle offers virtually limitless opportunity to all, regardless of their background.
That we have failed to turn this principle into reality in every respect does not mean we should abandon it, especially if in doing so we restore divisions between races and peoples that will undermine our potential to complete the task of building a truly pluralistic, strong, prosperous nation.

Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War with a relentless and at times even a ruthless will to victory because he knew a house divided itself could not stand. His image of a single American home is one of the most enduring political metaphors ever voiced. Today there are influential voices raised in intellectual America in favor of tearing down the single roof over us all, of sending whole communities to live, in a symbolic sense at least, somewhere else. They are the ones who say it is racist to teach Shakespeare instead of African poets to black children, and racist to force Latino children to learn standard English. Such social critics mouth a humanist line whose implications are utterly unnatural and cruel. They risk taking away from innocent schoolchildren the tools they will need to be productive Americans—to say nothing of the joy and inspiration of a heritage of great minds. They threaten to tear apart the greatest social experiment in the history of man. They should be exposed for what they are: incubators of disunity, distrust, and, ultimately, hatred.

Other enemies of American renewal in the cities are those in the entertainment industry who promote violence for profit, and those who propose we raise the flag of surrender in the war against drugs.

It is encouraging that the television industry is taking preliminary steps to respond to the public's outrage at the revolting violence and sex in entertainment aimed at young people. Children whose neighborhoods are unsafe should at least have safe homes. Instead, when they watch television or listen to their
stereos, the violence from the streets and schoolyards floods directly into their living rooms. Cartoon characters set things afire, rap lyrics extol the virtues of armed robbery and cop-killing, and movies make high body counts a badge of honor. They all promote violence. The vast power of our entertainment industry should be used instead to promote healing and a sense of community.

Hollywood elites claim that they are simply reflecting America and that America is sick. What they are doing is looking in the mirror. Hollywood is sick. Its values are not those of mainstream America. The depiction of violence and explicit sex sells, and Hollywood is in the business of making money. But by forgoing its responsibility to observe basic standards of decency, Hollywood has accelerated the decline of these standards in the community at large. By celebrating violence, it undermines whatever efforts families and community-based institutions are making to try to stem the tide of violence in the streets. Americans are right to be outraged at this profiteering. Unless Hollywood does even more self-censoring, it will envitably face censoring by government.