Where Have Parents Gone?

SAN FRANCISCO — Since Latrell Sprewell, a black basketball player for the Golden State Warriors, tried to choke his white coach, P.J. Carlesimo, the nation’s sports pages have been filled with the usual sermonizing. The million-dollar thug is a bad role model, etc., etc.

The moral life of this country, however, is not created by role models. The heroes and heroines of any society merely summarize the moral tone of the entire community. Or to put matters plainly: If a society’s athletes are becoming monsters, chances are pretty good that the society around them is not much better.

We are, surely, individually responsible for our moral behavior. But as members of a society, we also influence one another, establish taboos or violate them in ways that are hurtful or helpful to the general moral tone. The corrupt policeman in Tijuana and the black drug dealer in San Diego are ultimately moral partners with the cocaine yuppies in La Jolla.

The basketball player becomes arrogant once he has signed his multimillion-dollar contract with Converse or Nike. Shouldn’t we wonder about the arrogance of executives at Nike or Converse and the agents and lawyers who handle such deals?

If there was something particularly shocking about the Sprewell incident, it was that the athletic coach is one of the few adult figures who assume authority for many young people in this country.

But, then, who else in our society dares to lecture the young and to guide them? One noticed, after Sprewell’s assault, the general silence, save for Jesse Jackson, from the “elders” of black America. Who, in what survives as the black civil rights establishment, presumes any more to exert moral suasion over the new generation? The only regularly heard moral voice in Black America, I regret to say, comes these days from Minister Louis Farrakhan. Despite my deep respect for the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan, alas, strikes me as America’s most important racist and demagogue. But he was away, after the Sprewell incident, in the Middle East, playing the diplomat to flashing cameras.

I do not forget, however, that it was Farrakhan who organized the “Million Man March” on Washington. That march of black fathers and sons was an extraordinary event, mainly because its purpose and impact was moral, not political.

This year’s biggest religious story was another million-man march, in imitation of Farrakhan’s. An ex-football coach, Bill McCarty--”Coach Mac”--managed to draw tens of thousands of men, mostly white, to the Washington Mall, to a “covenant with God.” It was astonishing that so many American males felt the need to confess publicly their failings as husbands and fathers.

Organizers for a later million-woman march in Philadelphia missed the point. Their focus was on racial identity and politics. Their keynote, the notorious Winnie Mandela. What would she understand about the enormous moral hunger now seizing America?

One of the first persons to gauge this moral hunger has been radio talk-show host Laura Schlessinger, “Dr. Laura” as she is called by millions of her listeners. She is a bully and a moral show-off.

But poor Rush Limbaugh still is preoccupied with Trent Lott and Bill Clinton. What Dr. Laura wisely knows is that Americans are troubled by the silence in the bedroom and around the kitchen table--the gap between male and female, adult and child.

Something is wrong with the entire American family. Just as inner-city drug dealers depend on suburban users, just as thug athletes are managed by crass agents, so mommies and daddies create and support one another and their children--or they don’t.

The story of the year, not coincidentally, was the death of Lady Diana, a.k.a. “the people’s princess,” in a car crash with her playboy lover and a drunken chauffeur. For days after, London (one of the most masculine capitals of the world) was in tears, yearning for the beautiful lost mother. Americans, too, were unable to stray from the flickering light of television.

Why? Why, several days after Diana’s death, did tens of millions of people in the world again gasp at the news from Calcutta that Mother Teresa had died? 1997 will be remembered as the year the world mourned for the death of the mother. What people as grotesquely different as Farrakhan and Schlessinger understand, to their mutual profit, is that there is a great yearning in the world now for parents.

What Teresa of Calcutta showed is that one does not have to be a biological parent to be a good mother or, indeed, a good father. She was the greatest feminist of the century, establishing hospitals and orphanages, working within a very male Catholic church, undaunted.

She belonged to a 19th-century tradition of feminism. Feminists a century ago were not simply involved with their own emancipation. They worked simultaneously for the liberation of children and the abolition of slavery.

Today’s American feminists, like their careerist boyfriends, incline to a different sort of feminism--the feminism of me. Self-liberation is summarized by a career and the justification for self-seeking is contained by a thin notion of “role models.”

It’s Gloria Steinem logic: If we had more women doctors, more girls in America would have more role models. Nowhere, however, in the talk of role models is there any concern about the moral example that elders give or don’t give to the young. The preoccupation is simply occupational. My own suspicion is that we would have better doctors, more caring, more loving doctors, if we had fewer role models.

In general, the political left has been slower than the political right in recognizing the moral unease that afflicts America. But both sides would be wrong to suppose that here is a crisis for politicians to solve. Our moral dilemma is too far-reaching and intimate for politicians to manage. This Christmas, one has the weird sense that America is a country with many children but without adults.