Why should we bring back traditional values?

This week, Star Parker had a lovely column entitled "What we can learn from Simone Biles." Biles is a 19-year-old record-breaking gymnast whose jaw-dropping performances on the balance beam, vault, floor, and bars have been termed "gravity defying."

"Biles came into this world," wrote Parker, "in circumstances most would conclude were hopeless: black, poor, fatherless, with a drug-addicted mother. Circumstances such as these point to a high likelihood that this child would expect a life of poverty."

So what saved this extraordinarily talented young lady from following in her mother's footsteps? Quite simply, traditional values. A two-parent family. Church and faith. Hard work and dedication.

It was her grandparents who stepped in. By adopting Biles as a young child, they offered her and her sister the love, stability, marital unity, support and religious values she otherwise would have missed. Not incidentally, they homeschooled her as well – which not only increased the amount of time she could spend training, but also allowed to her bypass the liberal indoctrination of victimhood rampant in public schools these days.

Biles is a living testimony that victimhood in America exists only in one's mind.

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Parker asks whether the circumstances that saved Biles are miraculous or ordinary. Thankfully, the answer is the latter, not the former. Traditional values are within the grasp of nearly everyone. Many just choose not to accept them.

What do I mean by "traditional values"? I mean a married two-parent family (to specify, that means one man and one woman), preferably with one parent staying home. A strong emphasis on faith and church. A similarly strong emphasis on traditional (rather than trendy) education and personal responsibility, not victimhood. An understanding that in America, very little holds someone back except attitude.

Over and over again, this formula has been shown to succeed. Biles is a shining example.

But there are elements in our society that actively seek to undermine that formula. Hillary Clinton famously published a book in 1996 entitled "It Takes a Village," in which she verbalized what the left has been pushing for decades: that the family is secondary to community and government when it comes to the best interests of a child. (The left has this obsession with reinventing the wheel and fixing what ain't broken.)

And now we learn the Black Lives Matter movement is similarly antagonistic to families. In the "black villages" portion of BLM's website, it states: "We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, and especially 'our' children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable." (Emphasis added; note the absence of fathers in this list.)

This hostility to the very thing – family values – that has raised countless individuals to greatness astounds a black man named Roland C. Warren, president and CEO of Care Net. Writing for the Washington Times: "This principle starts with the goal of 'disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.' The irony is that this has already happened to a great degree in the black community. … From Black Lives Matter's perspective, we are making great progress. Using this logic, we should actively work to increase the number of black kids living in single-mother homes, absent their fathers, right? …

"In Black Lives Matter's worldview, it takes a fatherless village to raise a child, despite the fact that reams and decades of social science research strongly assert that children do better across every psychological, social, educational and economic measure of child well-being when they are raised with involved, responsible and committed fathers. Moreover, these outcomes get even better when a father is married to his child's mother. … The bottom line is that the Black Lives Matter movement sees no role for black men other than media-hyped props to promote an agenda that excludes and undermines them. As a black man, I find being used this way destructive, offensive and familiar."

Another successful black man, Walter Williams, pointed out the dangers of abandoning traditional values: "The nation's liberals – along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts – have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what's moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good or what is or is not criminal. … We have replaced what worked with what sounds good." [Emphasis added.]

Blacks in this nation face an uphill battle, thanks in large part to the evil effects of the liberal welfare state dressed up as "compassion" and "social justice." Parker accurately points out "the alleged cure – government programs and spending – has really been the disease." The last thing – the very last thing in the world – African-Americans need is to be further sabotaged by advice that's so fundamentally wrong.

It didn't take "a village" to save Simone Biles, it took a family … a family which included that critical component of a father.

Had this young woman not been plucked from the morass of "collective care," she would never, ever have achieved the greatness she now enjoys. Thanks to the rock-solid foundation her adoptive parents gave her, she was able to nurture the seeds of greatness so many young people miss because they're too busy surviving among the brutal realities of the "collective."

In Harry Browne's excellent book "Why Government Doesn't Work," he writes: "Each government program carries within it the seeds of future programs that will be 'needed' to clean up the mess the first program creates. No matter how much mischief it causes, government always shows up in a cavalry uniform – riding in to rescue us from the problems it created."

It took a village (government and schools) to really screw up traditional values. It is solely up to the individual to recapture the formula that works.

If you remove the foundation from a building and replace it with nothing, the building tumbles. If you remove the foundation and replace it with an experimental mixture of what turns out to be fluff and air, the building will stand wobbly for a time before it crashes.

You can't remove the foundational structure of traditional family values and replace it with nothing, or the result is chaos. Nor can you replace proven solid values with experimental social justice nonsense (fluff and air) because it too will crash after a period of wobbling.

As Ayn Rand put it, "We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."

Bring back traditional values – we know it works. Just ask Simone Biles.

Learn how to achieve a simple lifestyle without "going green" or joining a monastery. Read Patrice Lewis' helpful book, "The Simplicity Primer: 365 Ideas for Making Life more Livable"

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