Single Family Life

28 Pages 7027 Words

Article 1
InfoTrac Web: CPI.Q..

Source: Report Newsmagazine (BC Edition), December 18 2000, vol 27 no 16, p .42.

Title: Don't confuse compassion with indulgence: we should discourage the formation of single-parent households and help the poor to help themselves.

Author: Joe Campbell

Category: Social Issues
Subjects: Single parent family
Public welfare
Poverty
Language: English

Full Text: The Liberals and the NDP are the parties of compassion--right? Wrong! They are the parties of indulgence. Compassion and indulgence are as far apart as good and evil. One, in fact, is a virtue, the other a vice.
Aristotle observed that, generally speaking, moral virtue is the mean between the extremes of excess and defect, both of which are vices. Courage, for example, is the mean between recklessness and cowardice; generosity is the mean between prodigality and parsimony.
Compassion is the mean between indulgence and indifference. We are compassionate when we identify people in adversity and try to help them. We are indulgent when we pander to their weaknesses and risk harming them.
Virtues and vices are habits. We acquire them through repeated practice. The Liberals and the NDP have been practicing indulgence for decades. They've become very good at it.
Poverty is the issue most likely to provoke claims and counter-claims about compassion or the lack of it. The political left, whether Liberal, NDP or red Tory, prides itself on policies and practices that treat the poor compassionately. At the same time, it links the political right with attitudes, policies and practices that are indifferent, or even hostile, too
The poor.
Since poverty is a wide subject, I will deal with only two aspects of it: single parenthood and welfare dependency. Single-parent households, nearly all headed by women, face persistent financial challenges. Between 1975 and 1992, they were approximately five times more likely than two-parent families...