[April 22, 2022] Be loyal to your family, respect them, honor and protect them. Dedicate yourself to their well-being, for they are the ones who are on your team.
Loyalty is too frequently underrated. We are all flawed beings with particular and often curious preferences and attractions. We also tend to veer off the path of good to follow our own desires, often searching for something we frequently cannot identify. While searching to make our life meaningful, we must never forget that our families are supporters of our welfare.
Yes, there will be tragedies we will inevitably know – our parents die, our best friends move away, our spouse leaves us without a goodbye, our kids disappoint us. It matters not whether they deserve our loyalty, and perhaps they deserve nothing or worse. Yet, with our loyalty to them, we send a clear message and announcement to those around us that family is essential and has intrinsic value.
I’ve always believed that family (and friends) is much more than the immediate practical value of the equitable distribution of household duties, sharing costs, and working together on daily tasks. Families teach us valuable lessons, encourage us, warn us of impending danger, and generally demonstrate how to be a better person.
Unfortunately, there is an idea in the West that family structures of the past are unnecessary or at least not beneficial. It is believed that the nuclear or extended families are somehow unworthy of our allegiance and there is no cost to reject them. If so (and I think this trend is growing), then this failure to accept the family is tipping our moral scales in the wrong direction.
It is up to each of us to stand up for the family. The family’s role in raising the child goes back to when humans first walked the earth. No one can argue with any legitimacy that families are failing us or that the family does not deserve our loyalty. Doing so will spell disaster for our youngest.
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Please read my new book, “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).
Loyalty has a benefit beyond the obvious. Today, you get gov’ment “assistance” no matter what you do, esp. if you are a failure. No incentive to do better. Just collect your paycheck from the taxpayer.
Many families are in turmoil right now due to their strong beliefs. Brother against brother. Son against mother. Daughter against father and so on. Somehow, anger has taken over love. Many have lost the very definition of family. So sad. I pray each day that people will have an awakening and see that without your family you are lost.
when you deny God, you reap what you sow.
Got that right Armywife and Jerome. Gen. Satterfield has made it clear that loyalty to the family and respect for the family is paramount. Those who deny it are those who reject God, American history, and the belief in good communities and everyone contributes.
Good advice. Hard to follow because of the emotions. Making it work will be one of your greatest challenges in your life.
Young people no longer trust the ‘old ways’ of family life, hard work, honoring our elders, knowing our limitations, and humility. It is now all about me me me. Others do not matter except for what they can give. This attitude is destructive.
Despite the paradigm shift of the last few years, the American family presently finds itself in an abysmal state. The most essential institution in our society has crumbled as recent generations of Americans themselves neglected it — abdicating their responsibilities and leaving them to the government.
As woke indoctrination floods America’s public schools, parents are in turn flooding school board meetings to demand a return to sanity. Organizing against Critical Race Theory, LGBTQ ideology, and forced masking in public schools, parents are rediscovering a simple fact to which a growing bureaucracy had once blinded them — parents are responsible for the raising of children, and family is the context in which that occurs.
You got that right Jerome. well said.
The woke destroy everything they touch and that’s the aim. – Dr. Jordan Peterson
I enjoyed your article but it will be hard to fight this terrible trend. And, yes, the trend going against the family (nuclear or extended family types) has been going on for the past 60 years. How has that worked out? Not good.
Family is the basis of our communities. If you want to see an experiment in action, look at the poorest, most violent parts of our cities and what do you see? You see the almost complete breakdown of the family structures. If you walk the streets during the day (night is too dangerous) you will NEVER see a couple walking with their kids. The fathers are gone (probably doing drugs) while the mothers (those not dead) are walking around looking for a way to make a buck. This is most prominent in the black family. Sad. Once black families were stronger than white families. The 1960s started the decline and look at the results! Not racism but decline of their families.
The Decline of the Family
https://medium.com/catholicism-for-the-modern-world/the-decline-of-the-family-224a190e3625
If you want to see the traditional family in action, I recommend watching the movie Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. It depicts both the joys and troubles of a big family stuck in one house.
Currently, according to Pew Research, “almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%).”
family is every thing.
If you reject the family or reject your family members, then you are a superb idiot. Just my thinking. ✔
“The Impact of Family on Military Success” by Gen Satterfield
https://www.theleadermaker.com/the-impact-of-family-on-military-success/
When it comes to making a great Soldier, the family is the best predictor. Oh, I almost forgot the most prominent trait, COURAGE! Yes, moral and physical courage is found in those who are from and have the most stable families.
Quote of Gen. Satterfield, It is up to each of us to stand up for the family. That is correct. If we don’t stand up for the family, our younger misled kids will reject it as well. That will be a tragedy not just for them (they are dumbasses) but for our communities, higher crime etc, and our country.
Thanks Gen. Satterfield for a superb article. I sent it to my kids. I’ll let you know what they said.
” It is believed that the nuclear or extended families are somehow unworthy of our allegiance and there is no cost to reject them. If so (and I think this trend is growing), then this failure to accept the family is tipping our moral scales in the wrong direction.” Excellent commentary, Gen. Satterfield. Spot-on and something I’ve been thinking about for a long long time.
Mr. Asper, I guess you are seeing the results of attacks on the family in your High School classroom.
Yes, I do. Thanks Randy! 😊
Sad situation that our teachers are leading the charge against the family and yet they say the family is the reason they are rejecting the family. Screwed up logic.
Don’t assume that leftist, neo-Marxist progressive snowflakes use logic. In fact, there is no logic. There is only following lockstep to the most recent fad of liberalism.
Wow, excellent article, Gen. Satterfield. Keep up your run on fantastic articles.
I recently watched one of President Donald Trumps speeches. Then the next day saw Pres Joe Biden speak. What a HUGE difference. I think Biden would say anything. Is there a free thought in his brain? He only reads from the teleprompter. I bet he would reject the family if his ‘handlers’ wrote that for him to read off his teleprompter.
Someone needs to put him in a home for dementia patients. His minions are guilty of elder abuse. Personally, I think Biden is pure evil.
I hear you, Gen. Satterfield, be loyal to your family even if they are not loyal to you. It is important that those who reject the family – the anti-family political progressives – see us not rejecting the family. Pray for those that reject the family, that one day they will come around to reality.
The good news is that those stupid liberals aren’t having kids (for a variety of reasons – fear being one of them). If they aren’t having kids, then they won’t teach them to be boys if they are girls and teach them to be girls if they are boys.
I have no patience to the anti-American leftists in our society like Bernie Sanders and his ilk. Or Joe Biden, dementia Joe.
Same here. Crazies are running our country into the ground. And the liberals are laughing all the way. Let’s pray for a reckoning in November during our upcoming election.
Good point, but how to you deal with the idiots that are young that reject the family (even when they have kids?). Plenty of nuts out there. They don’t believe in marriage and reject religion outright.
Well said, Rev Cain. Be seen as accepting the family as a valuable institution and don’t throw out the baby with the water. In other words, message to the nutjob liberals, the family may have flaws but there is no reasonable substitute.