Why study families, though?

I've been studying the family since my first year at GCC in Southern California (Go Griffins!). The first term I studied there, the honors English class was combined with an introduction to philosophy. The combined course allowed for the dual study of a topic, and that Spring, the topic was Henrietta Lacks. If you're unfamiliar, Henrietta was a black woman in America who in 1951, through her own personal cancer tragedy, unknowingly contributed her cells to science.

Science was able to use these cells as a growing medium for researchers worldwide and they were used to create vaccines such as Polio and the new HPV vaccine. Her family did not profit from the global use of her cells and suffered generational poverty even trough the publishing of her memoir, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks". This travesty of modern medicine got me wondering.. how exactly do the families in our country interact with the government? What policies exist to better the families and do they work? This one family is only a telling example of a common story; no family is an island, yet many simply pass each other by and suffer silently when life gets hard. Government policies that micro-manage the family and allow greedy corporations to have a say in every aspect of daily life, even if that means feeding our children processed corn for every meal, are unquestionably destructive to the family.

I didn't come here to get political, but the border crisis in America is a prime example of ineffective governmental policies that are literally tearing families apart. I don't disagree with border security or the current administration, if you were curious, but I see the government as the direct cause of this crisis. Ineffective leadership caused figureheads to advocate for migrants to enter the country illegally, and those same figureheads don't have any idea what to do with a large population with an indeterminate ratio of children to criminals. You have mothers bringing their children with them in order to follow a boyfriend who found work, not seek asylum, and are rightly turned away at the border while the child is left behind because policy dictates that children undergo a more discriminate process, for the child's safety. Who told the mother to go to this place with her child? A government official in California, advising South Americans to migrate to their "sanctuary cities". It is disgusting on every level and these kinds of problems are just reflection of society and governments larger views of the family; as commodities and chess pieces.

It is my instinctual belief that a government would want to further the goals of that countries families but there are many inconsistencies with this belief and a governments actual actions. As a result, in America, we have widespread fatherless-ness and the resulting mental health issues and community crime that arises from such situations. Growing up in a household without a father, in a community of kid without fathers, I saw this first hand my entire childhood. I'm on a personal journey to discover the best ways to raise a child in this society and to figure out ways to make the society better for our families.

I didn't come here to get political, as I said, but there are obviously a lot of issues to unpack when considering why there are so many abused and neglected populations within the very families that constitute this country. I'm determined to root those reasons out through continued study and find ways to make real changes in my community. It starts with us, so get out there and find someone to help. Cheers!

Baking cake with olders and youngers