A Broken Institution

     If there was a 50% graduation rate from high school we would be in outrage that the system was so broken. We would not blame society and people in general for not being able to weather it out or having gotten into the school system when they should not have. No, we would blame the institution and try to either fix it as a whole or throw it out altogether.
     Now people would argue that "the system had always worked in the past by evidence of higher graduation rates 30 years ago while using the same institution of public schooling; therefore it must be society and the people that are coming through that cause such unacceptable rates of graduation." Well the clear counter argument would be that the only reason that graduation rates were higher in the past was because it was against the law to drop out of school therefore people were not graduation by choice but because they were forced to. Another reason that rates could have been higher in the past is because there was not much future for the people that have dropped out of school as compared to now. In the past people graduated from school in because they had no other future if they did not.
     Now it should be obvious this far in that I am not talking about the public school system. The graduation rate is nowhere near 50% (it is substantially higher). Also, there were far more options for the people that did not graduate high school 30 years than there are now and it has never been illegal to drop out of school after the age of 16. So no I was not talking about the institution of public schooling, I was talking about the institution of marriage.
     A 50% divorce rate. That is what we are dealing with in this nation. What does this say about marriage as an institution? Well first it means that marriage does work for some people. Clearly this is so for everyone knows people who are in happy and healthy marriages. Yet it also clearly says that the institution is broken. For some reason people blame society and "people these days" for such a low success rate instead of looking at marriage.
     While it is true that in the past divorce rates were a lot lower than today. Yet this is not because the relationships were successful but because there really was not any alternative. Until the mid-twentieth century a women could not divorce her husband legally. And even when women finally could file for divorce legally they had no real future if they did. Financially a woman was tied to her husband until recent decades and had no real alternative other than to either be broke or suffer through a dead marriage. Divorce rates in this country have risen along with the equality of women.
     The problem clearly is not society (unless you consider the equality of women a problem), it is marriage itself. This should not come as a surprise to us. Why should marriage work? Just because it is a long standing tradition reinforced by various religious beliefs? Maybe so, but that does not seem like a rational way to look at the situation. Maybe there is a great way to be in a relationship that we as a society just have not thought of yet. Or maybe there is no better alternative to marriage. Either way we should at least take a look at the institution of marriage for the mess that it is and realize that maybe there is no true "correct" way to be in a relationship.

A Man. A Chair.

He sits down at the kitchen table opposite a chair that is only occupied by ghosts these days.

Some days the children he never had sit, and eat cereal as they laugh at each other's jokes. Some days it's his brother who's chopper went down over the Pacific so many years ago. Every now and then, others pass through and share a meal with him; but the most common guest is his wife who died five years ago this day.

It's been hard for him since his wife passed. The cancer came in fast and hard. The doctors couldn't do anything except say a few nice words and send them on their way.

Alcohol might have helped, if he had ever drank. Instead he kept receiving the social security checks as the pain slowly crept closer and closer to his heart.

He kept the darkness at bay with his routine. Wake up, eat, watch TV, go to the store, play nine holes on the links, eat, take a nap, eat, read a book, put the gun in his mouth and wish he was brave enough to pull the trigger, sleep, start over the next day.

Finally he let the pain invade the shores of his heart and mind, and with it came bravery.

So on this anniversary he said good bye to each of the ghosts that had kept him company over the last five years. He played with his kids he never had. He talked about life his his bother who had died for an obscure noun. And finally he held his wife's hand, looked her deep into her eyes and told her how much he loved her. A single tear rolled down his cheek and they pulled the trigger together.