Opinion | Culture
Take a Break From Disjointed Capitalism
From self-destruction to phobia, cultural forces influence our unwitting minds.
Some of the fondest memories of my life are of my father. When I was two years old, like many other kids in the eighties, my parents divorced. Though my father fought valiantly for custody, the late-eighties were a different era, when courts almost unquestionably passed custody to mothers in most cases. That’s still the case, but we’ve seen a drastic decline in mothers with sole custody and a corresponding rise in parents with joint custody. Often, courts won’t let a parent take a child out of state when custody is shared. My mother wanted to move from California to Florida, which, in a rather unusual move, the courts allowed.
An agreement was struck— I’d stay with my mother in Florida during the school year and with my father during out-of-school breaks. Until my teenage years, every summer and every winter, I would visit my father in Ohio, where he’d gone from California to rebuild his life after my parents’ fierce divorce. He’d sunk his savings into the grueling court battle.
I remember the feeling of the sunshine and the wide-open skies during the long car rides when he’d come to pick me up from Florida and drive me all the way to Ohio —…
