May and June are the months in Nicaragua and in the United States when Mother's Day and Father's Day* are celebrated. June 1st the International Day of the Child, so focusing on family values may be appropriate for the next few blogs, especially in an election year.In our May newsletter we touched on family values lightly but "family values" is one of those topics that I think in the U.S. has been co-opted by the far right to push agendas that are not family oriented at all. While ignoring issues or even pushing certain agendas and laws, the far right actively and firmly hammer wedges into families that break families apart.
Income inequality is one of those wedges. Mothers and fathers are not at home because they are working more than one job. Minimum wage is so low that parents cannot feed their families which means working more jobs instead of helping kids with homework at home.
In the U.S., federally guaranteed paid sick and maternity leave does not exist and who is opposing paid sick and maternity leaves? The "family values" folks.
Conglomerates that make more money than God hire parents part-time in order to avoid paying benefits like health care, vacation pay. They don't even guarantee consistent hours for their employees.
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| Photo by Kolbe Charles |
And yet, when "family values" are discussed, many issues don't even come up, like:
- giving fair wages so parents have time with their children or each other;
- giving parents full-time work with health care benefits so that an illness does not destroy the family;
- giving them time away from work with pay so families can bond on a vacation;
- hiring people with set hours so they can plan care for their children;
- redoing the federal budget or raising taxes to support families struggling to make ends meet so they do not have to sell drugs to survive.
And so far I'm only talking about the workers and parents who are U.S. citizens.
Now if you add the poor families of the world into the "family values" discussion, there are even more hindrances to families. For example, we will pour billions into arming countries of the world even poor countries but our aid packets "should be cut, cut, cut." In the poorer countries around the world parents actually have to leave their homes to find work in wealthier countries so they can send money back to their families.
In Nicaragua families are missing parents, sons and daughters (1 in 6 Nicaraguans live outside country, mostly in Costa Rica or the United States) as they work outside Nicaragua to send back money to help their families survive...almost $1.2 billion (15% of the GNP) comes into the Nicaragua economy from remittances.
Foreign aid and immigration are huge issues with the "family values" people.
People who spout "family values" want to rip immigrant families apart through deportation forgetting we are all immigrants, except those who lived in tribes before the Europeans "discovered" the "New World."
When parents were sending their children away from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to the States to avoid death and horror, it was the far right...the "good Christians" ...who were the most horrific in their language. And it is these same people who place irrational fear above doing the right thing with the terrified Syrian refugee families.Why does the far right have ownership of those words, "family values"? I think it is time to claim those words for those of us who really want to protect the family. It is time we call the tactic of using "family values" for their own greed a sham.
-Kathleen
*May 30th is Mother's Day and June 23rd is Father's Day in Nicaragua.
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