WISDOM With Mama Dee: Does America Have Family Values?

Mama Dee takes a close look at a crucial issue in the news today, the absence of fathers in the home. It seems to have started with the Viet Nam war, in which veterans, a great number who were African Americans, were not given a hero's welcome when they returned, nor were they given homes and educational benefits. Many came back drug addicted and ended up homeless. With an entire generation of men gone from the community, the children of these men grew up without fathers, and therefore never learned the role of husband and father. They went on to impregnate women and leave them, never understanding how to build and maintain a family. This is the roots of our economically depressed, crime ridden neighborhoods. How do we reverse the trend of men who destroy their futures by not marrying the women they impregnate and not being in the home to raise their own children? African American men have likened their behavior to the culture of African polygyny, multiple wives. But there is a vast difference between a man being responsible for several women as a husband and a man being irresponsible for several women who are single mothers raising children alone. Women have now been conditioned to accept abandonment. How do we end this crisis of loss of American family values?