The Tragedy of Deadbeat Parents: Opinions from my expereince on a grand jury regarding child support collections

There was so much that I was able to learn from my experience as a foreman on a grand jury session for the summer of 2024 because it was a step onto the other side that you don’t get unless you are a professional prosecutor or attorney.  It was very good for me to see how the other side lives, and when it comes to a grand jury, you get to spend a lot of time there, as opposed to a regular jury that might hear one case for a few days and then be done with the experience.  And to see that many instances over some time, statistics emerge that are worth talking about.  Of course, there are a lot of cases that I was exposed to where the names and places can’t be talked about as they are pending, as well as the business of the people involved.  However, the root cause of the behavior that caused them to be in court, to begin with, is something worth talking about because it takes thoughts about things and carries them to an understanding due to the experience.  Something astonishing for me was to see how many cases of deadbeat parents there are in the world and to think what damage that does to the next generation.  I believe there is no such thing as divorce.  Once you bring a child into the world, you are committed to a family hell or high water.  There is no such thing as divorce.  From my perspective, I doubt many people have experienced hardships greater than me and lived to tell about it, let alone still be married.  Life is hard, which people over 40 realize, even under the best of circumstances.  And most people fight through it and live life.  Living happily ever after means living to the next day and still wanting to do it over and over again even when things seem bleak and hopeless.  But like most crimes, some people just never can get there, and in the wake is a mess that starts with the production of a child and ends in busted-up relationships that the courts have to sort through for some hope of a peaceful resolution that protects children from deadbeat parents.  

I have known a lot of people who ended up divorced, and I have heard of severe child support cases where people had to pay a lot of money to a spouse in the wake of a marriage.  And I never get too far involved because, to me, it’s always a sad story.  Two people, a man and a woman, got together and put a baby in the woman; she gave birth, and a wonderful baby came into the world that requires a lifelong commitment.  And the parents must dedicate themselves for life to that little character, hell or high water.  But when the marriage breaks up, there are all kinds of reasons why two people decide they can’t live together and raise that family, and usually, it comes from the fact that the two people never grew up into the responsibilities of adulthood.  The temptations of flesh to perpetually recreate the mating process, the fun part, never evolves into the hard stuff, the paying the bills, the cutting the grass, the buying of homes and cars, and the worrying about doing everything right that turns people from attractive young people into beat up demolition derby cars that look like by the time they are 50 into damaged assets headed for the junkyard.  People want pleasure without any of the pain, and in that pursuit, they end up destroying everyone associated with them along the way. 

I was astonished to listen to the many cases of a prosecutor trying to recover money from a deadbeat parent; it’s not always men.  Before I was on a grand jury, I heard the details of these cases and saw their commonalities; I had strong opinions.  But seeing the pattern emerge provided a much-needed perspective I am grateful to get.  To hear the testimony from professionals assigned by the courts to maintain the rulings of divorce was an absolutely stunning reality, and it left me thinking just how seriously we all must retake the building of family structure after years and years of failed progressive policies that essentially torpedoed the proper building of a family.  How some of these people could be $75K in debt to their child support was bewildering to me because, ultimately, bringing a child into the world is the responsibility of the parents, and not paying for those kids in either physical commitment or financial viability is reprehensible.  But what’s in common with all these cases is a disconnect from the reality of their role in the process.  The acceptance that the state is responsible for whatever kids are produced from a union and the state becomes the object of rebellion.  Most of the deadbeat parents, and in this case, primarily men, will pay one or two dollars every so many years when they owe tens of thousands of dollars because they think they are cheating the system that enforces the divorce conditions.  They don’t see what their actions are doing or what they will do to the future of civilization through the children they choose to bring into the world.  That disconnect to me was astonishing to witness in such mass quantities.  But the tragedy was in the acceptance that the state was really in charge of their lives, and they had no responsibility for the results of their life decisions. 

When a civilization no longer accepts responsibility for their very life, then there isn’t much anybody can do to help those people.  And they just become parasites to humanity.  Then, unfortunately, because of the way that children learn, the actions of the deadbeat parents are copied by the children only to do the whole thing over again.  And I saw how this entire process wore on the people working for the court.  I don’t want to say his name, but I was coming in from the parking garage one day where we were dealing with a whole list of flawed characters who weren’t paying their child support, and I saw the prosecutor smoking on the sidewalk outside of court, and he looked stressed out.  I’ve seen that look before, which is the kind of life where it’s hard to get up and go to work.  Because what you get when you get there is irretrievable pain and suffering.  But you punch through it like most people do.  It would be hard to look at these cases every day and collect evidence to present to a grand jury to get the indictments that might help somebody in these cases.  Maybe whoever has custody of the children will benefit from the money gained through the courts.  But likely not.  Most of what everyone was doing was only going to stave off the inevitable destruction of the children, which was the point of the policies, to begin with.  Those who have advanced the idea that families can be raised by the state and not by parents who sacrifice their very lives to give kids a decent shot in the world got it all wrong in their hatred for American culture.  They stuck their noses into the family building in our culture, and once those ideas sunk in, the government could raise our children while we ran around perpetually doing the fun stuff without the burden of the hard stuff made misery for everyone, including that poor prosecutor I witnessed smoking.  I came to know him as a great guy, and during my time in the court, I felt very sorry for him and all the people involved in child support collection.  They were trying to make something positive from literally nothing.  However, nothing could change the children’s reality when the parents failed to see the big picture and step into the role of mentorship.  Cheating the courts out of paying child support wasn’t sticking it to “the man.”   It was the perpetuation of the destruction of the American family, which was to attack the heart of America itself.  And in many cases, those enemies of our republic have succeeded and are very happy with the destruction they have left in the wake of their work.  And, of course, in the end, it’s the children who suffer.

Rich Hoffman

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