TEXT B The current political
debate over family values, personal responsibility, and welfare takes for
granted the entrenched American belief that dependence on government assistance
is a recent and destructive phenomenon. Conservatives tend to blame this
dependence on personal irresponsibility aggravated by a swollen welfare
apparatus that saps individual initiative. Liberties are more likely to blame it
on personal misfortune magnified by the harsh lot that falls to losers in our
competitive market economy. But both sides believe that the "winners" in America
make it on their own that dependence reflects some kind of individual or family
failure, and that the ideal family is the self-reliance unit of the traditional
lore—a family that takes care of its own, carves out a future for its children,
and never asks for handouts①. Politicians at both ends of the
ideological spectrum have wrapped themselves in the mantle of these "family
values", arguing over why the poor have not been able to make do without
assistance, or whether aid has worsened their situation, but never questioning
the assumption that American families traditionally achieve success by
establishing their independence from the government. The myth of
family self-reliance is so compelling that our actual national and personal
histories often buckle under its emotional weight. "We successors always stood
on our own two feet," my grandfather used to say about his pioneer heritage,
whenever he walked me to the top of the hill to survey the property in
Washington State that his family had bought for next to nothing after it had
been logged off in the early 1900s. Perhaps he didn’t know that the land came so
cheap because much of it was part of a federal subsidy originally allotted to
the railroad companies, which had received 183 millions acres of the public
domain in the nineteenth century. These federal giveaways were the original
source of most major western logging companies’ land, and when some of these
logging companies moved on to virgin stands of timber, federal lands trickled
down to a few early settlers who were able to purchase them
inexpensively. Like my grandparents, few families in Americans
history—whatever their "values"—have been able to rely solely on their own
resources. Instead, they have depended on the legislative, judicial and
social-sup port structures set up by governing authorities, whether those were
the clan elders of Native American societies, the church courts and city
officials of colonial America, or the judicial and legislative bodies
established by the Constitution②. At America’s
inception, this was considered not a dirty little secret but the norm, one that
confirmed to social and personal interdependence. Tile idea that the family
should have the sole or even primary responsibility for educating and
socializing its members, finding them suitable work, or keeping them from
poverty and crime was not only ridiculous to colonial and revolutionary thinkers
but also dangerously parochial. The writer’s attitude toward the idea of America family values is ______.