Here’s a snip from an article from The Atlantic about why it’s hard for the political left to talk about the breakdown of family, featuring observations from our premiere Asteroids Club event dinner guest in Tallahassee, Kay Hymowitz. Learn more about the program by clicking here. (You can have an event like this in your hometown…) Also check out the entire Asteroids Club-themed dinner season we’re hosting HERE.

According to Kay, “it’s like stable marriage and community are the secret sauce of economic well-being that nobody on the left wants to admit to using.”

So if liberals are so worried about economic inequality, why not talk about stable marriages? “Liberals have been at the forefront of challenging all sorts of tradition as being oppressive,” Hymowitz said. “That included the sexual revolution, feminism, and, of course, the gay revolution. Because the left is so identified with those themes, it becomes very difficult to propose that the break-down of the family has not worked very well, particularly for those groups the left professes to be most concerned about”

E.J. Dionne agrees with Kay and turns it around on conservatives focused on family but not apparently seeing related liberal concerns: “My shorthand is yeah, if you care about social justice, you’ve got to care about families. But if you care about families, you’ve got to care about social justice.”

From The Atlantic:

The problem is not that people on the left don’t find family or values important. It’s more that language, history, and ideology create political hazards, rendering family issues almost impermissible in the public sphere. As Robert Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, put it, avoiding family issues is a survival tactic in the face of deeply divided political camps. “If I’m a politician or organizer… on the left, it’s not so much a principled censorship, but a pragmatic avoidance of the issue to keep the conversation less mired.”

Read the entire article in The Atlantic HERE.

From Fox News:

“The Air Force says it can no longer afford to scan the sky for extraterrestrial threats that could doom the planet, all because of the sequester cuts Washington forced on itself when it failed to rein in the exploding national deficit. Called the Air Force Space Surveillance System, it’s “critical” to defense, the Air Force has said. By October 1, they’ll have to pull the plug.”

Apparently the extraterrestrial threats include about 1,000 asteroids large enough to “potentially unleash global catastrophic devastation to the planet upon impact.”

Kind of a big deal, yes? From this bit of asteroid news you probably shouldn’t expect much of a reaction from our elected officials. Last spring, when one asteroid actually did hit earth and one closely missed us on the same day, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) asked NASA chief Charles Bolden what NASA would do if a large asteroid was expected to collide with earth in three weeks.

“The answer to you is, ‘if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.’ The reason I can’t do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off.”

So break out the space suits, America, and give Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck a heads up. Looks like we’re on our own again.

“In America nearly every man has his dream – his pet scheme – whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age.” It is a characteristic which is both bad and good for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still but drives both forever on to some point which is ahead, not behind nor to one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen and then the individual is wrecked. The aggregation of such cases affects the nation and thus is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is – of course – better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from than to be without.”

Join us for a discussion of rising economic inequality in our Dinner at the Square season kickoff “American Dream Lost?” Tuesday, October 15th. Get more information HERE.

“In America nearly every man has his dream – his pet scheme – whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age.” It is a characteristic which is both bad and good for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still but drives both forever on to some point which is ahead, not behind nor to one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen and then the individual is wrecked. The aggregation of such cases affects the nation and thus is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is – of course – better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from than to be without.”

Cartoon courtesy of XKCD.com

Learn about our Asteroids Club season online HERE.

Apparently to deflect an asteroid we shouldn’t “run in circles screaming” – we just have to change it’s speed a ten millionth of the total (as long as is still way out in space). One thing for sure, you don’t address an asteroid problem by ignoring it until impact (apparently our current plan). Find our new Village Square Dinner at the Square season “Join the Asteroids Club” (in Tallahassee, Florida) online here and our first dinner of the season “American Dream Lost” (covering the rising inequality and family breakdown asteroids) online here.

Robert Putnam, in the New York Times:

‘As successive graduating P.C.H.S. classes entered an ever worsening local economy, the social fabric of the 1950s and 1960s was gradually shredded. Juvenile-delinquency rates began to skyrocket in the 1980s and were triple the national average by 2010. Not surprisingly, given falling wages and loosening norms, single-parent households in Ottawa County doubled from 10 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 2010, while the divorce rate more than quadrupled. In Port Clinton itself, the epicenter of the local economic collapse in the 1980s, the rate of births out of wedlock quadrupled between 1978 and 1990, topping out at about 40 percent, nearly twice the race-adjusted national average (itself rising rapidly).’

‘…The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of we. ‘

Read the whole article online HERE.

Check out our upcoming program looking at rising inequality HERE. And you can check out the whole dinner season HERE.

“Nothing struck me more forcefully than the general equality of conditions among her people.”

Read all about what we’re up to in Tallahassee HERE. Contact us about hosting your own Asteroids Club event!