Jacobs on "Families Rigged to Fail"

I’ll probably spend a fair bit of time on the first threatened pillar of our culture that Jacobs tackles: family and community, despite this admission:

Most of my observations on North American community loss and other subjects are not news to anyone who takes an interest in the conundrums of our time and is reasonably well fortified against amnesia. “Families Rigged to Fail” Dark Age Ahead (p42)

It’s the narrative by which she weaves these observations together that is so compelling.

And prescient.

Families need communities. With strains on our time and our finances, we’ve rigged our families to fail. The current economic crisis is only the most recent riptide affecting our way of life. Familes are the basic economic unit. We’ve rigged them to fail.

You can’t focus on one issue to figure this out. Jacobs brings in streetcars, ancient Rome, the cost of housing, reliance on the automobile, and more. You can’t just focus on the family.

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Jacobs remains pithy in her rhetoric here, referring to anyone “reasonably well fortified against amnesia.” Who, reading that, would count themselves out?