Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 192 | The Explosion of Homelessness and How it Relates to Fatherhood
Transcript
- 0:00homelessness and the epidemic level of it is really just collateral damage of our vision of life. Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
- 0:33What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So Jeff and I love to look at some current events through the lens of this whole sort of breakdown in the family being a team. And one of the ones that a lot of people are experiencing right now is the absolute explosion of homelessness happening. West Coast cities are being absolutely taken over by this problem.
- 0:55Forbes just wrote an article that said, The 44,000 people living, eating, defecating in the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases, including typhus. Garbage is everywhere. Experts fear the return of cholera and leprosy. I mean, this is crazy. In Western American cities where we're seeing these horrible diseases creep back that we thought we got rid of in the Middle Ages. And so when you think about what in the world is happening,
- 1:21Why are there so many more homeless people? And so many of them are men that are homeless. And so the Washington Times did some research on this, and it was really fascinating what they said about the root cause of some of the explosion here. It says, As I spend time meeting and speaking with these homeless fathers, I was awakened to the fact that this tsunami of father absence
- 1:43is going to have a second wave. Millions upon millions of fathers are going to grow old on the streets or in isolated homes with no connection to their children and the social safety net that these connections provide. Alas, these fathers have broken the social contract with their children that says, I will care for you when you are young, and you will care for me when I am old. Because these fathers weren't there for their children, their children won't be there for them either.
- 2:13So that's kind of what's happening, you guys, is that a lot of these men who are on the streets of these Western cities are fathers. They have children, but they abandoned their kids when the father was young, and they weren't there for them. And so their children, their children now...
- 2:31aren't going to be able to provide or be there for them, and they're struggling in health, struggling with addictions, struggling in their old age. And so one of the things that we're not really absorbing as a culture is what happens when you destroy the family in this way or when you don't think about family as a team. There are so many external costs,
- 2:53that don't come until the next generation or 10 or 20 years later. And this particular external cost of the fact that people are now growing old without the safety net of their children providing for them because they abandoned their own kids when they were young is going to become worse and worse problem. And we're going to see in the next few decades how badly this particular problem is going to create for our culture. But yeah, Jeff, what are your thoughts on this one?
- 3:18Yeah, I mean, I don't have much more to add to that one, except the fact that I think, yeah, I think we don't realize homelessness is an epidemic in the West, and it is in major cities, in populous areas, and it's brutal, right? And it's brutal, and it wreaks devastation on so many different layers. But I think what we need to realize is homelessness and the epidemic level of it is really just collateral damage of our population.
- 3:39vision of life, right? Like it is the collateral damage of the Western individual ideal that we, that there's no, there's nothing to hold people who tend to fall through the cracks, either because of mental illness, hardship, something, some type of job, whatever. And it would be, yeah, I'd be fascinated to see if there could be some really good comparison to see how many of those people wouldn't fall through the cracks based on a stronger family,
- 4:01or stronger support system, stronger neighborhood, stronger community. But it does start certainly in the home with that abandonment of a father's heart. And then what that does, which is crazy, like you said, then kind of as a cycle that goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, which is really interesting, and then repeats. So I think, yeah, I think just being mindful of that and understanding that and really understanding the big implications.
- 4:21And you guys, one of the reasons why we want to talk about this here is because as I was even researching this, 99 out of 100 articles will never mention anything about family or fatherhood in any of them. So the reason why it's important to talk about this, you guys, is that it seems to be a root cause, the breakdown of the family or what's going on between the social contract between fathers and children.
- 4:43But the culture won't talk about it. The culture will only talk about how do we help homeless people. They won't get down to the root because they do not want to face what happens to individual freedom when you begin to elevate the importance of family stuff. So we want to make sure that this is articulated for you guys as you think about some of these big systemic societal issues.
- 5:05Hey guys, we know it's really challenging to try to build your family team when all the tools you've grown up with or seen essentially are aimed at only helping develop family members as a collection of individuals. That's why we launched familyteams.com where you can find all the tools we've developed with tons of resources at different price points, free courses, videos, writings, etc. that help you build up and transform you and your family into a multi-generational team on mission. Check out all the resources we have over at familyteams.com.