“YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE THERE”
In 1959, I was 18, newly married to my former boyfriend of four years, and thrilled to be starting my “grown-up” life with the man of my dreams. Little did my then-apolitical self know that the close of that halcyon decade had been preceded by nearly a century of a concerted effort to destroy the American family, an effort fueled by the same fanatical Communist zealots who now occupy the Oval Office of the United States of America!
Now why would anyone––much less a huge number of people––want to destroy the greatest and most successful experiment in government in world history, one which President Abraham Lincoln described as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” the Democratic Republic of the United States of America?
Simply, because it flew in the face of every political system that previously existed––monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, aristocracies, totalitarianism, communism, socialism––systems in which the immense power and abuse-of-power that these regimes exercised would be vanquished if replaced by the Power of the People that the Founding Fathers of America envisioned.
The mission of those other regimes was never ever about concern for their populaces; rather it was––and is today––purely about the acquisition and maintenance of power and control and especially the immense wealth that comes with both power and control. Always, always, always follow the money!
HOW CAN WE DESTROY AMERICA?
The enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy this fledgling experiment. It was clear to them that America’s strength was a function of three phenomena:
- A fervent belief in the God who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
- An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of Freedom. Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
- The most passionate was the embrace, belief, and allegiance to family, its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.
If we destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government. And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing––as their predecessors did–– every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.
ASTOUNDING PROGRESS
The America haters among us have already:
Still, the family remains their most desired––yet maddeningly elusive––target.
HELP ALONG THE WAY
That effort was generously helped––perhaps, at first, innocently––by the theories of Sigmund Freud (1836-1939), the Austrian neurologist-cum-psychiatrist who was wildly successful in convincing the relatively new and free-thinking American public that the genesis of neuroses, phobias, anxieties, obsessions, depression, psychosis, and general psychological malfunction not only took place in the first few years of life, but that the mothers who raised these suffering children were primarily to blame. Later therapists, like the sadistic psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, blamed mothers for their children’s autism.
Mission #1 Accomplished: Mothers are not good for children.
These psychological theories prevailed throughout the 20th century and up to today, embraced by generations of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists until 1998 when they were thoroughly debunked by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, where the Harvard-educated psychologist and editor of most of the psychology texts used in colleges and medical schools in America argued persuasively that a person’s peer group is the major influence of thought, feelings, and behavior throughout life.
THE NEXT STEP
In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the most world-changing medication in history, developed by Dr. John Rock, a Harvard professor and obstetrician-gynecologist with five children––along with Drs. Gregory Pincus, C.M. Phang, and Selzo Garcia. Their creation was the birth-control pill, aka The Pill! For the first time in world history, women had control over their reproduction.
For millions of women, it was their own Declaration of Independence, and a huge relief not to have to worry every month about getting pregnant.
Mission #2 Accomplished: Now we can be just like men, some women reasoned, and have as much sex as we want without worrying about getting pregnant. Thus was the Free Sex movement born and a complete redefinition of traditional morality.
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!
Three years after The Pill, in 1963, a book by Betty Friedan, a housewife with three children, shot to the top of every bestseller list. In essence, The Feminine Mystique told women that they were simply too smart, too creative, too intrinsically or at least potentially powerful to be spending their time, actually wasting their time changing diapers, folding laundry, and—the most colossal waste of time of all––raising children.
Nevertheless, Friedan’s book resonated with multimillions of women who had lived through the peaceful ‘50s and been spared the suffering and sacrifice of their mothers and grandmothers who had lived through the Great Depression in 1929, planted Victory Gardens during World Wars I and II, joined Rosie the Riveter in working in factories and shipyards to help the WWII war effort, lost husbands and sons to war, often raised children on their own, yet kept their families intact. The list of their arduous and valorous deeds goes on and on.
But that was then, the young women of the ‘60’s believed…this is now. Look what we have already accomplished! After that stodgy old Republican President (and former General) Dwight D. Eisenhower, we elected the dashing Democrat John F. Kennedy, with his glamorous wife Jackie and their two adorable children––all who ushered in the age of politics on “live” TV.
Mission #3 Accomplished: Multimillions of young women abandoned the once-desired goal of early marriage and motherhood and instead enrolled in colleges and universities where they pursued professional careers ranging from medicine and law and architecture to jobs like telephone linewomen to military combatants to firefighters to hedge fund managers to business executives, et al.
Coincidentally, ahem, an economy that once allowed men to work outside of the home and support a wife and children magically became an economy that only two working parents could afford. Kind of like an economy that was completely energy independent in 2020 quite magically became one in which the President of the United States had to beg foreign countries to sell him oil in 2021.
REALITY SETS IN
But the ‘60s also ushered in the historically unprecedented rash of violent assassinations––live on TV––of:
- U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (age 46),
- Firebrand Black activist Malcolm X in 1965 (age 39),
- Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (age 39),
- Former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (age 42).
All of a sudden, the idealized world of the newly emancipated women was shattered. The world is out of control, they realized. Is it any wonder that so many of them enthusiastically embraced (or attended) the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, with not only free sex but a geyser of drugs for the smoking and snorting and injecting?
Mission #4 Accomplished: Many of these college-educated women congratulated themselves on avoiding marriage and especially motherhood, asking themselves: “Who wants to bring a child into this world?”
ONLY A FEW YEARS LATER
In 1971, Gloria Steinem––“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” ––founded the first national feminist magazine, Ms., along with founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin and others.
Its message, as Pogrebin said on TV, was to spare women the dire fate of talking to their friends about laundry detergents. This and other angry feminist messages inspired an entire generation of women to use The Pill, defer marriage, go to college, pursue careers, and not even contemplate marriage or motherhood until their early- or mid-thirties, when their biological clocks started ticking quite loudly.
Mission #5 Accomplished: The traditional nuclear family was being dismantled by a new generation of women who bought into the notion that making money was infinitely more satisfying, meaningful, and important than raising children.
MARRIAGE OUT—NOW BABIES OUT!
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in Roe v. Wade that all women had a “right” to an abortion. To this day, that decision is the Holy Grail of millions of women who believe that “my body, my choice” starts after they’ve had unprotected sex and gotten pregnant with a baby they don’t want.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision for abortion back to each individual state. Today, every woman in the United States who wants an abortion can get an abortion, although some may have to endure the inconvenience of traveling to another state…forget about the inconvenience their embryos face of a death sentence!
Mission #6 Accomplished: The once-most-cherished accomplishment of both men and women—to be the parent of a newborn baby––was effectively reduced to ending that baby’s life in utero. And today, in some states, abortion exists right up to the moment a full-term baby is delivered, and, believe it or not, in California, even up to the time a healthy thriving baby is 28 days old!
THE TICKING CLOCK
But uh-oh. After graduating from college and laboring in the workforce for over a decade, millions of women realized that this money-making thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But looking for a good man––after stepping on their necks on the way up the ladder––was even more problematic.
Nevertheless, the new social phenomenon of women marrying in their mid-thirties and older took hold, and not coincidentally gave rise to a booming in-vitro-fertilization industry, as millions of these new brides learned that conceiving and carrying a child after the age of 35 was both a “high-risk” and extremely pricey enterprise.
Mission #7 Accomplished: Take the joy out of intimacy and sex, make it a mechanical act, and further erode both marriage and the family at the same time.
BUT WHAT ABOUT MY CAREER?
The modern women had been told by the influencers of the day that they could “have it all” –– marriage, children, and career. Since they wanted it all, they bought it!
Some women were lucky to have their mothers or mothers-in-law or even young grandmothers volunteer to raise their children, and a rare few could afford expensive nannies.
But most women had to rely on another industry that boomed like no other––the daycare business––where mothers dropped off their infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to caregivers who tended up to 20 or more children at a time. This meant that for the entire day, paid workers made sure that those children were safe and fed, but not necessarily held, loved, comforted, taught, or nurtured.
However, this still allowed the mothers of these infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to brag that the hour or so they spent with their child at the end of a day––in which both mother and child were exhausted––was, ahem, “quality time.”
In addition, these “older” mothers, already guilty about the protracted hours away from their children, strove to be “friends” with their kids, praising them for, um, waking up in the morning, even smoking pot with them, and, in essence, abandoning the traditional role of the parent who teaches right and wrong, good and bad, proper behavior, et al.
Mission #8 Accomplished: Women out of the home, children being raised by strangers, the American family being dismantled piece by piece.
THE GENIUS STEVE FACTOR
Two geniuses…Steve Case, the founding CEO of America Online (AOL) in 1983 (which really took off in the ‘90s), and Steve Jobs, who invented, created, introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
No need to elaborate on the degree to which these geniuses totally eliminated face-to-face communication and succeeded in riveting both parents and children to all the tantalizing distractions on these electronic devices that separate people and depersonalize intimate relationships, especially meaningful communication between parents and children.
Mission #9 Accomplished: Family concerns take a backseat to beeping texts, sexy emojis, Facebook invitations, Instagram images, Hollywood gossip, and horrifically graphic porn sites, which even savvy eight-year-olds can access with ease.
Worse, this has given rise to an entire generation of sociopaths who, understandably, have little or no human empathy, given the largely robotic care they received, combined with their toxic schooling and intimate “relationships” with their electronic devices.
Also, a remarkably fragile generation. When parents fear that “everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them,” write Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt in “The Fragile Generation,” children are left “more fragile, more easily offended, and more reliant on others.” Safe spaces, anyone?
EMBOLDENED PSYCHOPATHS
With all this success, it is no wonder that the lunatics who are running the insane asylum that is America today have inflicted their warped vision of the world on a tremendous number of people, thanks largely to a corrupt leftist media who are literally paid––see Media Whores––to carry these sick messages 24/7.
Men can have babies, they say. Well, of course, it you’re a woman who thinks she’s a man and decides to “transition” and undergo a double mastectomy and take testosterone injections but keeps her ovaries and uterus and Fallopian tubes and then is artificially inseminated and conceives and carries a baby, all the time proclaiming her maleness, he/she must think we’re all like recent Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who when asked to define a woman said she couldn’t because “I am not a biologist.” Right.
“YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE THERE”
And now we have an ad––since removed and eliminated from every search engine––that shows a child laughing and sharing an experience with her clearly delighted mother. Both are on iPads communicating long distance. The ad ends with a voice telling the mother: “You Don’t Have to Be There.”
Right. The mother doesn’t have to be there to raise and love and comfort and teach and tuck her child in at night, and the father doesn’t have to be there, either. Only Big Government should raise their child to be a good little obedient Communist. That’s the message!
Mission #10 Accomplished: Father never mentioned, mother out of the picture, the actual premeditated murder of the American family.
I rest my case.
©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.
