R.J. Rushdoony wrote this in 1996. Now, 27 years later, I’m old enough to see how right he was.
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-war-against-the-family
Have you ever seen this sticker on a car? “We are spending our children’s inheritance!” All too often, that is literally true. There are all sorts of “elder care plans” that suck up every dollar of what parents might otherwise leave to their children. There are more of them now than there were in 1996.
And we’ve all seen this: parents retire, move hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their surviving family members, eventually their health begins to fail… and then they pine away for visitors, forgetting how difficult they’ve made it to visit them.
And offspring who move away from their parents. Again, hundreds of miles. Patty and I knew a sweet and benign woman whose adult children harshly rejected her and moved from New Jersey to California… with the grandchildren. “Y’know, Mom,” said the daughter, “there comes a time when the old coyote crawls off to die.” Comforting, isn’t it?
“Social decay begins with the family,” said Rushdoony.
Right on target.
We really do have to do better by our families. And there are many villains out there working against us, who’d like nothing better than to see the family broken up.