I finished high school in 1994. My school was in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and 20 minutes down the road was where the Santamarias lived. I didn’t know of Bob or The Movement at the time, but I did have a sense that there was something important in the atmosphere.
Maybe it was just the anticipation and anxiety that accompanied the end of 12 years’ grind in schools. Maybe it was something more. Nonetheless something was in the air. Bob was 79 years old in 1994. While I was studying for year-12 exams, he was writing an essay. Like many of his writings, it is more confronting and more realistic and hard-edged than many give him credit for.
This essay didn’t mince words. This essay didn’t repeat platitudes or try to make people feel nice. It is an essay written with the cold, hard stare of an intellectually honest man who knew there was no point in hiding the truth from people. It is a fearless essay, unafraid to ask the sort of questions that scare people.
Bob’s essay was on the family. It began life as a paper to be delivered at an international conference hosted by the Australian Family Association. It ended up published in the book, The Family: There Is No Other Way. Even now my wife and I hand this book to friends to give them ideas and comfort and give them a sense of some of the thoughts of The Movement.
In this essay, Bob asked the obvious question, the one at the back of many peoples’ minds, the one that seems even more relevant over the last few years: “Are we wasting our time; Are we flogging a dead horse;” in pursuing these policies and fighting for the family?
More pointedly, the keen historian in Bob, noticing the intertwining of the family and our civilisation, pointed out that, “after all, civilisations die”. He knew the rot begins with the demise of the family.
The last few years this question has confronted us more and more as we see the rise in so many “isms” breaking up family life. But more than that, we see an economic system and a political system and an industrial system that seems pitted against the family unit, be it small and nuclear or large and extended.
The reason we continue to fight for the family is simple – because it is the basic unit of human society. Small or extended, it is foundational.
We see the social libertarianism of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture “marrying” the economic liberalism of the ’80s and the ’90s, and the one result is lonely, broken people struggling to get by.
We see families struggling to keep a roof over their heads. We see the elderly consigned to nursing homes that are run like factories. And the people desperately trying to keep them alive and well are themselves struggling.
We see children shuttled from thing to thing to thing, educated and entertained by machines and brought up to be perfect consumers, as if the Pixar film WALL-E was documentary and not animation.
And we have seen how little our efforts seem to matter.
This is the conundrum Bob was unafraid to confront so long ago. He knew we must look these challenges in the face, that there’s nothing gained by pretending they don’t exist.
The reason we continue to fight for the family is simple – because it is the basic unit of human society. Small or extended, it is foundational.
Human beings do not exist in isolation. We are not individual units in a complex system, but our very existence is enmeshed in family relationships.
The answer to Bob’s question is that civilisations may die, but reality itself does not. Civilisations die when they neglect reality, when they forget realities like the family and the systems needed to support and maintain them.
We fight because we must. We fight not against things undermining the family, but we fight for those things that support the family. We fight for love of our families; we fight out of love for a better world.
Love is the answer to Bob’s question.
Luke McCormack is national president of the National Civic Council.
