I’m so glad my friend, who is a physician, invited me over to dinner, even though we are supposed to still be social distancing. As the crowds of protesters in San Francisco chanted yesterday, “social justice is more important than social distancing.” Surely the most fundamental social justice is the human family: a world where children can play at the beach all day under the loving gaze of their parents, and where their priest can come to dinner to rejoice in their shell collection, and lead them in the rosary after dinner. Demonstrations have very little power to correct the deeply entrenched socio-economic injustice we call “racism.” Only strong families and healthy neighborhoods can make black children know that they are loved. Who will teach children that they are “created for greater things, to love and to be loved,” if they are deprived of a natural family? 75% of black children in our cities, like Minneapolis, have no balanced and secure family life. That is the real reason they are gunned down and suffocated on our streets. We can protest all we want, and even riot, if it makes us feel better. But it won’t solve the fundamental problem. We all need to breathe, and we can only do that in the open spaces of the heart created in our loving families.