Are You Responsible for the Violence?

“It Takes a Village” Philosophy

No man, woman, or family is an island. But in these days, community isn't always what it is needs to be. We'd all like to think we live in a place where people care about others -- where people are willing to help when things get tough, where it's safe to let our children play around outside. Unfortunately, this is not what most of us experience. Instead of community, we find estrangement; we are attacked by crime; hoping for a better life for our kids, we encounter gangs and drugs and gunfire. People often retreat behind closed and double locked doors and try to ignore their neighbors.

Parents spend less time with their children than ever before, and this can have a big effect on how children develop to be responsible as well as how they develop other positive characteristics. If parents aren't around to help develop children, they can develop bad habits.

Today, the “village” appears to be non-existent. Each adult made it their responsibility to correct us if we needed to be corrected. Even the adults who didn't know us still made it their job to discipline us, protect us and tell on us. There are people who have been living on the same block for years who never speak to each other.

If the breakdown of communication in the village isn't bad enough, with everything foul and indecent going on in the world around us, there are still some folks who hand the duty of child rearing over to the streets.  Something is very wrong in our neighborhoods right now and it goes way beyond the epidemic of our children being killed by stray bullets any time you can type your address into a website and find more child molesters than school teachers in your area.

As parents, we get weary because we work overtime, some of us are single parents and some of us are overwhelmed by our addictions and afflictions. But, some of us are just plain selfish. Parents, some of us don't realize if we don't put positive energy into our children and we leave it completely up to the village to raise them, we're not guaranteed favorable results because a lot of the residents of the village are not trustworthy.

But in the end if you don't stay true to your children and make time to be a positive role model to them, you will be forced to cope with the potential problems that can arise and the problems are not hidden from the village. On any given night, you can watch the news and hear a report about a young person who has taken an innocent life and handed his troubled existence over to the appropriate authorities.