A Quote by Kurt Vonnegut
One thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.
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Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we've lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it's the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.
The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.
We need a revolution in the West: not violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change.
I think what we need to do is to step back as a society and say okay, we've kind of turned things upside-down. We have moved away from the nuclear family, in which the man always works and the woman stays home. How are we going to rearrange things now? We've done the first part of the revolution, we've turned everything on its head, but we haven't figured out what structures will actually work in this new world.
A loving family provides the foundation children need to succeed, and strong families with a man and a woman - bonded together for life - always have been, and always will be, the key to such families.
New York has one of the largest school systems in the country, but it's one of the best school systems in the country. I worked on an initiative called Family Strengthening. What it meant was we began to work with families, people coming out who were incarcerated, connecting them back to the family. Kids today, some of them need psychological help, not just providing for them. We have issues - we have to break cycles. We need to be accountable and we need to assess what's working and what's not working.
Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.
Figure out who you are separate from your family, and the man or woman you're in a relationship with. Find who you are in this world and what you need to feel good alone. I think that's the most important thing in life. Find a sense of self because with that, you can do anything else.
But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals.
The number one need in all people is the need for acceptance, the need to experience a sense of belonging to something and someone. The need for acceptance is more powerful in your family than anywhere else.... If that need is not met by your family, trust me, your kids will go elsewhere to seek it in order to find approval and acceptance.
These kids are looking for direction, for identification. Kids join gangs because they need a father figure or they want to be part of a group.
I've been learning about defunding our investment in police force mentality, and reinvesting in, what do young people need? What do people who get involved in drugs need, what do families need outside of money to take care of their families?
I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking — it's a valuable thing my mom created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armor. I'm sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That's why relationships work.
Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.
Kids need love and kids are not getting enough love in America because kids haven't been going the right way. We need to protect families by allowing same-sex couples to get married and also we need to protect religious freedoms because, in this country we allow people to practice religion or not practice religion.
We need another revolution in the Arab world. We need an education revolution. If there's one thing we need to focus on, it's redesigning our educational systems.
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