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| © David Hartman |
I'm a writer, and I know good writing when I read it or see it. That's why I'm such a big fan of the old drama series Homicide: Life on the Street.
The episode "Every Mother's Son" from season three and written by Eugene Lee, is one of my favorite episodes in the series primarily for two segments of the show. A clip of one of those segments is cued for you above. The video quality isn't the greatest, and you'll have to scroll down again and turn off the dinner music so the audio from the video clip doesn't play over the music.
In the clip are two scenes of two mothers -- Patrice Sayers and Mary Nawls -- interacting quite by accident in the "fishbowl" of the homicide unit of the Baltimore City Police Department. Between those scenes is a cut to the ongoing interrogation of 14-year-old Ronnie Sayers, who shot and killed Mary Nawls' son, Darryl. That scene isn't important to this post, but I was too lazy to edit it out and merge the bookend scenes together. That I don't know how to do that also is a factor in you getting the bonus scene.
Mary Nawls finds herself at the homicide unit to talk to detectives about her son's murder, and is sent to the fishbowl to wait for the detective to see her. Patrice Sayers wanders into the fishbowl after Darryl has detectives escort her from his interrogation. At 14, he's a man now, and anxious to prove he doesn't need his mommy anymore.
It's only by accident that a victim's mother and a suspect's mother would be allowed to be together in that situation, but the power of the story is that to this point, neither Mary or Patrice know the connection they share. Soon enough they will, and how they come to terms with that is the driving story of the episode.
In the meantime, they're just two grieving mothers who form a bond as they wait and wonder where it all went wrong.
"Where are all the men these days? That's what I want to know."
That's Patrice's question, and it's one I thought about Sunday in church as I read the snippet in the bulletin about all the upcoming women's programs at area churches. There's like a half a dozen of them in Oklahoma City in the next few weeks.
I've got nothing against women's church programs and such. I just don't think they're needed nearly as badly in our churches and families and communities today as programs and seminars to teach men how to be men. Husbands how to be husbands, and fathers how to be fathers.
As a group, women seem to have it much more together than men today. And men not having it together is the main reason why our society has become such a mess.
I'm one of those people who believe that most of the moral and social problems we face today can be traced directly to the breakdown of the traditional family. I'm not gonna spew statistics, but the numbers are there if you want to look for them.
Over the past several decades, unplanned, out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy has steadily increased. It's to the point now where we're overrun with unplanned children born to parents either unwilling or unable to care for them. No one ever heard of anorexia or bulimia 50 years ago. Gang activity, drug abuse, suicide -- all way up. I don't think it's a coincidence that also on the rise during that time has been the divorce rate and the number of households that only have one parent from the get-go.
But don't be fooled into thinking that the increase in divorce and single parenting is the only cause of the breakdown of the traditional family. The number of two-parent dysfunctional households also is alarming. And it's probably more disturbing, because the intentions that precede the dysfunction often are noble and good.
Parents want to provide a better standard of living for their kids. Nothing wrong with that. So mom goes off to work, and kids go to daycare or come home from school to teenage babysitters or empty homes with televisions until one of the parents gets home from work.
Parents want their kids to be smart. They want them to be successful and well adjusted and social. What parent wouldn't want that? To jumpstart that process, at an earlier and earlier age there's soccer and baseball and basketball and band and scouts and tutoring and youth groups and dance and clubs and cheerleading and volunteering and piano lessons -- all of it good stuff, mind you. Unless there's so much of it that Johnny's never home. Without balance, Johnny grows up to be smart and popular and successful and he marries Jane who is equally smart and popular and successful. And they make babies without the slightest clue how to parent them because neither one of them spent enough time at home as kids to learn how the whole parenting thing is supposed to be done.
Even in stable, two-parent homes, kids can't model what they're not home to see.
I know it sounds hokey and old-fashioned. I know Hollywood doesn't make things easier by glamorizing violence and sex and general moral decay. But if the downward spiral is going to stop, it's going to stop at home.
And men are going to have to rise to that challenge. No more running from babies and families.
We're going to need dads who take their kids to church, then bring them home to God's other house.
We're going to need more men who teach their sons how to treat and respect women by showing them how dad treats mom. We need more fathers to teach daughters that real love has nothing to do with shapes and sizes and that your best gifts are never worth trading for the cheap imitations that pass for love today. We need more dads with the gumption to teach that right is right, wrong is wrong, and shades of gray are a myth. We're going to need dads willing to set limits and teach kids that that life isn't all about you by living lives that aren't all about themselves.
Superheroes that fight the evil in this world. We could use some real X-Men in this town.
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