What We Lived, What We Saw, and What It Cost Us
I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s — not the Detroit of nostalgia, but the Detroit of factories, racial tension, political assassinations, and a government that believed it could redesign society from the top down. The country was shaking itself apart, and kids like me were standing right in the middle of it.
We lived through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the assassinations of RFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. We lived through the 1967 riots, and the Black Power Revolution — the gunfire, the smoke, the tanks in the streets. We lived through the moment when families began to need two incomes just to survive, when fathers worked double shifts, and when kids became latchkey children because there was no one left at home to watch them.
And behind all of it were the forces no one wanted to talk about: segregation, integration, Jim Crow’s shadow, and the rise of Black Power. These weren’t abstractions. They were the air we breathed.
By the time I was fifteen, the adults around me — white, working‑class, exhausted — were whispering fears that integration would lower academic standards. They weren’t quoting studies. They were reacting to what they saw: schools overwhelmed, teachers stretched thin, and students arriving from underfunded districts with fewer academic foundations. The conversations were racially charged, yes, but they were also rooted in the lived reality of a city already cracking under pressure.
Sixty years later, literacy rates have collapsed. The fear they voiced — however clumsily — wasn’t entirely wrong.
In 1964, Detroit had junkyards by the hundreds. By the early 1970s, they were gone — vaporized, scrapped, packed into shipping containers, and sent to Japan. And Japan sent them back to us as Honda Civics and motorcycles.
I remember standing with my brother‑in‑law over a brand‑new Honda Civic in his driveway. We towered over it, two Detroit kids looking down at the future. We said, “Japan is going to take over the car market. Detroit is going to collapse.” We were fifteen. We could see it coming, and then we witnessed the wholesale collapse of the US steel industry, and in Detroit, began the layoffs and the closing of plant after plant, impoverishing thousands of auto workers.
Kids today are told they can’t handle difficult questions. Kids then were predicting the collapse of American industry.
That’s the contrast I’m writing about.
THE GOVERNMENT THAT BROKE THE AMERICAN FAMILY
Families didn’t collapse on their own. The government pushed them over.
From the late 1960s through the 1980s, policymakers rewrote the rules of American life:
- No‑fault divorce turned marriage into a temporary contract.
- Child Protection Teams raided homes on anonymous tips.
- Parents were jailed for corporal punishment that had been normal for generations.
- Welfare programs penalized families for having a father in the home.
- Courts stripped parents of authority and handed it to bureaucrats.
- Bussing policies tore children out of their neighborhoods and dropped them into hostile schools.
Detroit didn’t fall because people failed. Detroit fell because the government destabilized the very structures that held the city together.
And while Detroit was being socially engineered, the rural Deep South — poor, hard, and overlooked — still held onto the old ways.
Southern kids grew up with:
- chores before sunrise
- consequences that were immediate and real
- teachers who backed parents
- parents who backed teachers
- communities that didn’t outsource discipline to the state
Life was harder, and because it was harder, kids were stronger.
Detroit kids got friction from the streets. Southern kids got friction from the soil. Both learned to stand up straight.
As I’ve said many times:
“Friction is the tuition you pay for wisdom.”
Today’s kids get friction from nowhere — and it shows.
The Rise of Fragility Culture
Fragility didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was manufactured.
When the government criminalized discipline, subsidized fatherlessness, and replaced community authority with bureaucratic oversight, it created a generation raised without the pressures that once formed judgment and resilience.
Then the digital age finished the job.
Screens replaced parents. Algorithms replaced boredom. Therapy language replaced responsibility. Schools replaced rigor with emotional management. Universities replaced debate with “safe spaces.”
A child who never meets resistance never learns his own strength. A child who never hears “no” never learns to govern himself. A child who never faces consequences never learns cause and effect.
As I put it:
“If you wrap a generation in padding, don’t be surprised when they fold under pressure.”
Fragility culture is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of removing every hard thing that once formed capable adults.
