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The people who worry about such things appear to be rather concerned about some of the numbers flowing in from last year's U.S. Census. What has them most alarmed, if the cover of the May 28 edition of Newsweek is any indication, is the decline of the traditional nuclear-family household.
Or, as Newsweek put it, Why the traditional family is
fading fast
and What it means for our kids.
Not quite satisfied with what I read there, I called my
favorite Washington insider source: Retired Lt. Col.
Ananias Ziegler, media relations director of the Committee
That Really Runs America, and asked him about these social
trends.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >What should you make of these trends? You should make
money, of course. That's the American way, Quillen. What's
your problem?
My problem? Well, aren't we facing
the loss of our precious family values, with all that
entails? I'll make this real simple for you,
Quillen. You write for a newspaper, right? And newspapers
need circulation, right?
So far he was making
sense, and I urged him to continue. So you take a
nice traditional family with Mom, Pop, Junior and Sis in a
comfortable suburban home. They get the paper. And they
only need one copy, right?
Unless there are some
custody battles over the crossword puzzle, I agreed.
But suppose they get a divorce. They've got to set up
two households. That means two newspaper subscriptions.
More income for your business, right? And Junior, the
second he turns 18, goes off on his own because he can't
handle being the rope in a tug-of-war between parents --
there's another potential subscriber. A