Obama, Socialism, and the Threatened Family

Words express our joys, they also express our fears and observed concerns.

Pastor Jeremiah Wright, when asked whether he had spoken to his former church member, President Obama, since moving into the White House, replied, "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me."

Ironically, the white supremacist, James von Brunn, who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC made almost an identical statement, "Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do."

San Antonio Express News Columnist, Jonathan Gurwitz, dismisses these concerns,finding it "almost too much to comprehend" that "nutjobs on the left and right have the same unhinged preoccupation with all things Zionist."(June 17,2009,
pg. 7B)

However, from my experience and observation it is very possible that President Obama's move toward socialism has been guided and influenced by Jewish professionals.

In 1976 I completed my master's thesis in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. A large portion of the professors, perhaps even 40%, were Jewish and socialism was accepted by most professionals as the direction in which our country was heading.

During this same time period, Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner, a Jewish professor in the School of Human Ecology at Cornell, had returned from doing research in China. Bronfenbrenner was impressed by the child care patterns he observed in China, and concluded that this was the direction in which we need to move. He made a number of public speeches to this regard.

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I wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Ithaca Journal. The letter was printed verbatim as a guest opinion column on Tuesday, December 7, 1976.

The remaining portion of this entry will be a reprint of this article.

The Ithaca Journal titled the article:
THE NUCLEAR FAMILY: IS IT THREATENED BY SCIENCE?
by Marjorie Coppock

I am increasingly upset by the continued proliferation of Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner's interpretation of the American family. His basic concerns for family, caring relationships and concerned societies are certainly areas with which I identify; however, his conclusions and solutions indicate a bias in data collection that I have come to believe is not only misleading but deliberately so.

In a front page article in the Land Grant Gazette, Dr. Bronfenbrenner deplores the existence of problems such as "family disintegration, high divorce rates, children growing up in families with a single working parent, plunging achievement scores in basic communicaton skills among high school students, drug abuse, delinquency, high rates of child abuse." He contends that the American family is dis-integrating, becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of society.

He states: "We've carried our individualism, the 'do your own thing' mania to ends that are not constructive. We have a paranoia about helping one another, excusing it with axioms about how you'll wreck the moral fiber of people by giving them a helping hand. This may be true when you are strong and know how to help yourself, but it's not so fine for the sick, the elderly, those who are small and alone, for children who can only be victims. We are not a caring society. We are unwilling to make irrational loving commitments to children, to families, grandparents, relatives, even our wives and husbands. And beyond to friends, neighbors, community, indeed even to our country."

He continues in the article to commend the socialist countries such as Sweden and China for their exemplary patterns of 'people caring'. His lecture on this topic follows the same pattern - Our families and communities have fallen apart: therefore, we need to adopt socialism because socialism 'serves the people'.

Dr. Bronfenbrenner decries the loss of the extended family: the grandparent, aunt-uncle, brother-sister support system which in the past has cared for the individual. He decries the breakup of the nuclear family; the high divorce rate and the large number of working mothers. He decries the mania of 'do your own thing'. However several situations have converged to cause me to believe that his concerns are more political than compassionate. (Although I am not questioning the depths of his compassion.)

Last summer, I was discussing Dr. Bronfenbrenner's concerns with a woman who now lives in Rochester. She commented, "I'm interested in what you're saying because I was a student in that department 20 years ago. The situations that he claims have now occurred are the very things we were taught to teach. We were to encourage students not to return to their home town and to their extended families but rather to move to a new town in order to be independent and 'do your own thing'. Perhaps he has helped to create the situation that he is now exploiting."

The second situation concerns the brand of feminism that is supported by the professional educators. If the extended family has been threatened in the past by professional counsel, the nuclear family is presently under intense attack by those women whom the professionals choose to support.

As a student at Cornell I actively tried to bring to consciousness the important contributions made to our society by homemakers believing that these contributions should be recognized by more than the Ladies Home Journal. Much to my dismay I discovered that many professional women also are unappreciative of these contributions. Women are being encouraged to remain single or accept divorce as a viable alternative. Women are being encouraged to leave their families and to leave their children in day care centers, to develop careers and enter paying jobs.

One woman professor stated, "We should not just stay at home and have children who only cry and vomit." Another woman in a lecture advised the men in the audience to "kick your wives out of the house. Make them become economically independent so they will not be a burden upon you."

I am not necessarily opposed to all of these trends; however, my concern is deepened by the realization that one of the main advisors for the women's studies program is a male professor who works closely with Dr. Bronfenbrenner. The question becomes, "Are these men working against each other or with each other?"

The third situation which causes me to question the statements of Dr. Bronfenbrenner is the treatment accorded by the professional community to data recently collected for my Master's thesis in another department at Cornell. These data contradict almost all of the statements he makes. The thesis was a survey of the woman volunteer. A 10 page questionnaire was mailed to 900 women volunteers in Tompkins County. Five hundred and thirteen women thoughtfully completed and returned these questionnaires.

The predominate impression from this overwhelming response was that of a deep concern for family, community, the sick, the elderly and the children. These women were not motivated by a mania to 'do their own thing' but rather a desire to 'serve the people' because of a love for their fellow man. They expressed no paranoia of helping one another. Their responses and comments (written along the edges, between questions and on the backs of the pages) indicate irrational loving commitments to family, neighbor and community.

Their deep concerns were perhaps developed by the altruistic and intrinsic rewards instilled by religion as 85 percent of the women identified with a religious affiliation. These 513 women gave 3,205 hours each week to community service organizations. Because the sample was randomly drawn these data can legitimately be extended to thousands of women. In observing the volunteers in our community I suspect the data could be equaled by the men who contribute generously of their time to run church activities, service organizations, scouts and sports activities.

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I was not prepared for the treatment which I received from the professional community. Although data had been collected on background characteristics, volunteer job involvements, attitudes toward job satisfaction and attitudes toward six currently debated policy orientations it was dismissed as 'predictable and merely data'. After receiving the returned questionnaires I received essentially no more help from the professors in the analysis of the data.

The only assistance was the following advice: "Tell the women they are being exploited, they are taking paying jobs from other women, they should form a union so the National Labor Board can speak for them and then go on strike." I was stunned. Although the data does not support this advice it was repeated on two other occasions.

I cannot condone or condemn socialism. I would need more information to do so. Perhaps we could benefit by adopting some of the 'people caring' patterns of socialist countries. I do, however, deplore the manipulation, distortion and suppression of data for political reasons. I have both personal experience and observation to support the contention that this is occurring. We cannot deliver a caring society from the bowels of deception.

When Dr. Bronfenbrenner speaks with concern for the American family and in the same breath praises the Chinese and Swedish families he overlooks the government infringment and control which exists in socialist countries over the cultural training of the children. The beauty, freedom and strength of America and of existence itself lies in a multiplicity of ideas and in variations of cultural interpretations. The authority and autonomy of the family unit is the cornerstone upon which these variations are built.