by Cleveland Dingle

Created on: June 23, 2010   Last Updated: June 26, 2010

Family's foundation is LOVE. When love is not in the equation there will be turmoil and pain. In America, we have the inalienable right to believe and think whatever we want too, we supposedly have the right to say whatever we choose to say but, things don't always work out that way. Nowadays, who can we rely on for love other than our family? Throughout the human evolution family we are all linked together, one to the other world wide, believe it or not. Economics have control of the planet, things are more expensive today than thirty, forty, even one hundred years ago. Today, the focus is more on survival than the intimacies of family structure.  Back then, families stayed together more so it seems to me than we do today in 2010. Family life has changed from one generation to the other, lets explore.

My grandfather the late great Lee Dingle left this earth recently, he was 106 years old. He grew up on the shore islands of South Carolina with my grandmother who later became his wife. Granddad told me he worked in the Brooklyn Navy yard in New York City. He had sons he needed to take care of, my father being one of his five sons. I look back at the industrial revolution period and I see how recessions back then rocked the foundation of family lives, nonetheless, the immigrants that came here to work toughed out the recessions and later became the million and billionaires of today. Before the industrial revolution the barter system was grand! Farming or agriculture was the big money maker. Families could eat, live, and grow economically all from their own land. There was no state legislation that prohibited the farmers from growing and prospering, the way it is today with zoning laws, zoning rules and so forth. Back then life was a bit more simpler for families.

Since the baby boom in the sixties, American families have had to readjust to the growing demands that family life required, like food, clothing, and shelter. More and more the focus drifted from love to economics in households. For African Americans the struggle was hitting home ten times harder than their Caucasian counter parts. We had to deal with racism and discrimination along with the daily duty of being a man at home. A lot of southern African Americans back in the day belonged to large families as my mom did being born in Mississippi. She had eleven other siblings growing up with her on my granddads farm. Men stayed home and took care of their families in-spite of how large the family was,

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