There is nothing to take the place of an excellent set of parents to assure the superlative success of children. So there won't be any new and improved authoritarian heavy-handedness aimed at the nuclear family and dreamed up by far-leftist collectivists to supplant it — not now, not ever.
Dr. Friedemann Freund — principal investigator at NASA, lead scientist at the SETI Institute, professor at San Jose State University — is an admirable example of what is produced by caring, dutiful, upstanding parents. Professor Freund married well, taking the hand of Hisako Matsubara, the daughter of a prominent Shinto priest in Japan, herself a respected novelist, publishing works in English, German and Japanese.
Their union produced a son, Minoru Freund, an offspring with the potential to outdo even father and/or mother.
Mino — his nickname and the title of Matsubara's recent work — was on a fast track to outshine his illustrious parents. Growing up in Germany, the child was already speaking several languages and reading and writing Japanese at a very young age.
His parents introduced him as an adolescent to the arts and literature as well — achieving considerable skill in piano and drawing. He double-majored in mathematics and physics and went on to the uber-prestigious Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.
As an adult, his star was streaking. At the age of 47 he was director of NASA's nanotechnology center and had already had a role in dozens of astounding accomplishments in too many great NASA projects to list. One feat stands out, however.
Making the acquaintance of two scientists who were working on constructing the first scanning tunneling microscope (STM), he himself, almost on a lark, built a functioning STM, one capable of imaging single atoms, somewhat beating to the punch as it were, the two scientists whose perfected apparatus won them a Nobel Prize.
What's missing in Minoru Freund's biography is almost as telling as well, though. There's no litany of scurrilous social media postings in which he lashed out at the centuries-old institutions and traditions that made him what he was.
Also absent are unseemly and vulgar public displays, outbursts demeaning either his mother's or his father's race and culture. And as far as remaking the ancient constructs in the half-dozen languages he spoke, he took no part with those determined to destroy the beauty, power and dignity of English grammar with extremist political pomposities.
Friedemann Freund, in the spirit of full disclosure, is a friend; he was gracious enough to write a section of a chapter in one of my recent books on earthquakes. I'm repaying the favor by holding his son up to the world as the sort of citizen this nation desperately needs, especially since he's no longer with us.
Minoru Freund contracted a very aggressive brain cancer in 2009 and passed away in 2012 at the age of 49. His family, colleagues and friends, of course, were devastated.
But family, for the new totalitarianism determined to undermine America and the West, far from being the inviolable foundation of society, is despised and under attack today. "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake," screams the title of a recent article in The Atlantic in March 2020, going on to suggest that "it's time to figure out better ways to live together."
And there are hundreds of articles being spawned from extremist propaganda fonts spewing the same Orwellian groupthink. Indeed, for those whose lives are devoid of decent family interactions and filled with partisan angst instead, who blame all their shortcomings on their parents, everyone's parents, all our ancestors going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens, the 330,000 year old nuclear family isn't broken — they are.
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("The Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many newspaper and magazine Op-Eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio worldwide. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. Read David Nabhan's Reports — More Here.
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