There never was a time in America when Dad worked, Mom stayed at home raising the kids, and there was a white picket fence in front of the house.
That’s what Jonathan Capeheart, a black reporter for the Washington Post, said when he was on MSNBC with Martin Bashir on Monday. Bashir, who said of Republicans, “They want to take America back. They want to take it back from the president,” turned to Capeheart for corroboration, and Capeheart responded mockingly:
They want to take this country back to a mythical time when everything was just fine, when Mom stayed at home and dad worked and there were 2.5 children in a yard that was guarded by a white picket fence … and those days, those were the days of Hollywood. Those days never really existed.
That’s funny; I remember those days all too well, before divorce was considered normal, before children were reading in school about kids having two daddies or two mommies, before you needed to drive your kids to school because you never knew whether it was safe for them to walk, before criticizing a culture that tried to eradicate you was forbidden by political correctness, before thousands and thousands of lives were snuffed out because women felt that having a child was inconvenient.
Capeheart is a young man, so there’s a possibility that he’s just stupid and ignorant. But it’s also possible he truly thinks he’s telling the truth.
Either way, he doesn’t understand the real question is: back to what, and forward to what? Given the choice between Obama’s forward march toward traditional America’s oblivion and Mitt Romney’s path back to traditions, Capeheart is in for a surprise; there are plenty of us who remember those “mythical” times and long for them to come back.
And we vote.