KIRA DAVIS: The One Act of Heroism We Never Acknowledge Is the Nuclear Family.

In these days of coronavirus, the word “hero” has been used non-stop to describe doctors and nurses working on the “front lines”. We’re even calling our teachers heroes. I guess I don’t mind all that much. I understand the sentiment. I suppose it’s quite easy to look at a picture of a tired doctor at the end of a long day in ICU and call him a hero for sticking out the job he gets paid to do. We can look at his fatigue, his crumpled scrubs, the lines on his face from his mask and we can see the sacrifice right there on his face. We can measure his impact because what he does has immediate outcomes in real-time.

It is far more difficult for some starry-eyed, millennial opinion writer with a brand new thesaurus and a gig at The New York Times to look at a father schlepping back and forth to his office job every day and see a hero. That writer probably sees a bored man, or a defeated man, or an uninteresting man who doesn’t have an immediate impact on those around him….certainly not the way a doctor does. His heroism is invisible, because you can’t make a commercial out of it. His service, his bravery is spread out over an entire lifetime, not just one crisis.

The commitment to the nuclear family is one of the most heroic acts in our culture and yet it remains invisible…to the media, to celebrities making thirsty social media posts thanking the “heroes” four times a day, to our elected officials. In fact, the traditional family seems to only ever be insulted and derided in pop culture these days. I suppose that is because so many of our coastal reporters and celebrities don’t have families of their own. They don’t know how to quantify the sacrifice it takes to raise a family and maintain a marriage. It just looks like a relic of a different era to them, instead of the essential foundation of a healthy and prosperous society.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.