Dayton Daily News

After the shootings, we need to look to culture, not politics

- Star Parker Star Parker writes for Creators Syndicate.

The nation must now endure another gut-wrenching tragedy, with 31 having been senselessl­y gunned downed in Texas and Ohio over a weekend.

This came after a week where three were gunned down in California.

My appeal is to consider these tragedies a crisis of culture and not to turn them into politics, which is already happening.

I’m thinking about the words of Robert F. Kennedy when he spoke to a crowd in Indianapol­is in April 1968, after hearing the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered.

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in,” said Kennedy. He himself would be assassinat­ed shortly thereafter.

Kennedy appealed to Americans to move away from “polarizati­on” and “hatred” and toward “love and wisdom and compassion.”

It is a great temptation to simplify what is complex, and this tends to mean translatin­g everything into politics, looking for some individual to blame and looking for some simple policy answer that will solve the problem.

But these tragedies are not simple or partisan. They have occurred too often and have occurred under Democratic as well as Republican regimes.

There is a sickness in the soul of our nation, and that sickness plays its way through and winds up expressed in deadly, pathologic­al acts of lonely, lost, confused individual­s — disproport­ionately, young males.

We must try to grasp the nature of this pathology and consider how it may be addressed.

If we look, we can see other telling symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the rate of suicide in the nation is the highest since 1942.

From 1999 to 2017, the suicide rate increased 33 percent, and in 2016, suicide was the second leading cause of death in the age range of 10 to 34.

The rate of suicide among young men is more than three times higher than that of young women.

On the other side of the spectrum, while young Americans are taking their own lives at an increasing rate, fewer are having children and getting married.

Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has written about the huge exit of prime-age males — 25 to 54 — from the workforce. In 1965, according to Eberstadt, 96.6 percent of prime-age males were working. Now its 88.5 percent, meaning millions of prime-age males have left the workforce.

All this has occurred as Christiani­ty, once a pillar of American society, has been pushed to the margins.

Per Gallup, in 1974, 65 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the church or organized religion. By 2019, this was down to 36 percent.

Faith builds a sense of belonging to something true and greater than oneself. It provides meaning and an anchor in times of difficulty and uncertainl­y.

As faith and eternal truths become more marginaliz­ed, more young people, particular­ly young males, become isolated and left with a sense of meaningles­sness. They lose the key framework through which one takes responsibi­lity for their lives.

It produces an inclinatio­n to look for others to blame for their difficulti­es, for their personal struggles. Sometimes it becomes violent.

There is a great price to be paid for a culture of meaningles­sness.

This is what we should be thinking and talking about, rather than simple political answers and who to blame.

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