When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
My parents kept the best aspects of the Asian culture, and they Americanized the family. My mother was a great example for me. She was a working mother with a good career.
My father and his brothers and sisters were childhood Irish jig champions in the Bronx. At our family celebrations, they all get out and do the jig. And of course, the younger generation, me and my cousins and my brothers, we have our own Americanized renditions of the Irish jig, which is a bit more like 'Lord of the Dance.'
Growing up around Amish farmland, I enjoyed the opportunity to witness firsthand their love of family, of the domestic arts - sewing, quilting, cooking, baking - as well as seeing them live out their tradition of faith in such a unique way.
One of my earliest memories was of seeing horse-drawn buggies with little Amish children peering out at me from the back, their legs dangling as they jabbered in Pennsylvania Dutch, sometimes pointing and giggling at my family following slowly behind them in our car.
My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.
My Portuguese uncle had a Portuguese version of a ukulele. The family would pull it out after dinner and play Portuguese folk songs on it. I couldn't wait for him to finish so I could get my hands on it. I was seven or eight years old. And he used to have a Fender amp in his house and an electric guitar. I would spend hours making sounds.
It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.
My wife is so analytical with raising kids, and I am not. My feeling is if they turn out good, then that means I was a good daddy and put a lot of effort into it. If they turn out bad, it means they took after her side of the family.
I'm not an anarchist, but I believe that people don't want the royal family - the so-called royal family.
I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.
I was the first member of my family to cross into Pakistan and find his ancestral village.
When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
Not all children have the anchor of a strong family.
We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.
There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.
When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends, family.
I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.
