The Failure of American Fathers

Sunday marked the day a grateful daughter held the first Father's Day celebration at a YMCA in Spokane, Washington 108 long years ago.

Sonora Smart Dodd wanted to honor of her father, Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, a single parent who raised his six children. And so we have Father's Day.

Sadly, we fathers are not so smart these days and our failures make headlines nearly every day.

I look at the cards we send, the phone calls we make, and the sentiments we share and I shake my head in disbelief.

I consider all of the things dads are supposed to be to our families and, by extension, our greater world-wide family of humanity -- protector, provider, teacher, comforter-in-chief, fair-minded, selfless, generous, providing a good example -- and I find us failing miserably, particularly here in America.

Consider, the majority of our elected officials are men, and most of them are fathers as well, so it is on we fathers that the weight of this nation's failures rest.

Hopefully, the wave of women running for office in these mid-term elections will tip that balance and help to make this nation a kinder, more nurturing place. It cannot come soon enough.

But in the meantime, look around at the country we fathers have built.

On Sunday, an article I wrote about what the prevalence of school shootings has made normal in our schools was published in The Mercury.

I knew when the fathers of this country failed to take any action on gun control after the massacre of Sandy Hook Elementary School children in Newtown, CT that nothing would change; that if image of slaughtered children, of parents grieving could not motivate our nation's fathers, nothing would. 

And nothing has, despite shooting after shooting after shooting. We throw up our hands and say "what can we do?"

We're fathers. We're the ones who are supposed to do something.

But as I looked into those devilish details of what the alternative to taking action means, our failure became more painfully apparent.

Because American fathers love their guns more than their children, kindergarten students at Lincoln Elementary School are no longer surprised (or terrified) when they hear there is an armed intruder prowling the halls who wants to shoot them. 

Rather than running screaming through the halls, like any normal person might, they calmly barricade themselves in a classroom, or silently slip through the halls when their teacher gives them the signal.

For them, it's routine, and they drill for it three times a year.

Think about that for a minute, our children practice dealing with a gun-toting murderer in their school; the place they are supposed to feel safe, cherished.

They drill like they would for a fire which, Lower Pottsgrove Police Chief Mike Foltz sadly noted, is now statistically less likely than an armed intruder shooting them in school. 

How can we have normalized that? As fathers, how can we have accepted that our kids have to drill to keep from being shot in school? Because we have failed them as fathers, that's why.

Some believe the answer is more guns in schools. If the answer to any problem is "more guns in schools" we have failed as fathers.

We are, depending upon our politics, watching, allowing or actively encouraging hate to once again take a place as a legitimate reason for policy. 

That unthinking hatred drives the headlines I read about children being separated at the borders from their fathers and mothers, who committed the crime of seeking a better, safer life for their families -- like so many of our fathers and grandfathers did before us. 

I cannot begin to imagine what that would do to me, to be separated from my son when he was young as we undertook an act of desperation in search of a better life. He clung to us when we tried to leave after dropping him off for a three-day stay at karate camp. To be a parent and live through what they're doing at the border?

It's unthinkable.

But American fathers are doing it every day, and we don't give it much thought because they're not our children.

And the people who have decided that is the appropriate policy for our country are fathers as well. They are fathers in a country whose creed was once "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

I can imagine a father writing that, although the poet who wrote it was neither a father nor a parent. All the more ironic that Emma Lazarus could so clearly define a promise that we fathers, who seem to have lost all empathy, can no longer claim to keep.

Now, because their parents violated old and unreformed immigration laws (an area of policy in which the United States has a decidedly tarnished reputation) we punish the children.

If that inhumanity is truly the policy of this nation, the fathers who run it have failed.

I see the selfishness of the fathers who worship money and accumulate more of it than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime. And to preserve it, these fathers act to enforce a wage gap that keeps the children of other families living on the edge -- one major illness away from financial ruin.

The richest country in the world has the second highest child poverty rate. How can you call yourself a father and a leader of this country and allow this statistic to stand; to say without irony that such a country is in the midst of being made great again?

Keeping children safe, fed and under roof is job one for a father, a job at which the nation's fathers have undeniably failed. 

I look at the melting ice caps, the seas rising in Miami, an increasing frequency of severe storms; all the result of the climate change widely accepted throughout the scientific world as fact.

And I see the fathers who lead this nation living in denial of the truth, ignoring what is literally a world-wide threat that much of the rest of the world recognizes and is taking action, however timidly, to address.

Because, for the fathers who run this country, money is more important than providing breathable air, clean water and a livable climate to the next generation of our children. 

In April, French President Michel Macron spoke to Congress like a father is supposed to speak to a child, trying to make them aware of a reality they cannot avoid as adults.

Like the father who tells his children, "life is not fair," Macron told a recalcitrant Congress of failing fathers the truth with which they must contend if they ever grow up -- "there is no Planet B."

That the people who embrace the denial of this looming global disaster represent the nation that has done the most to bring it about is truly to shower shame on a nation that is supposed to be "the shining city on a hill."

My son, now 19 and a member of his college debate team, has initiated this conversation with me several times with increasing effectiveness, particularly when anyone mistakenly refers to him as a "millennial," that supposedly pampered generation of "everyone's-a-winner" fame.

He points out, with painful precision, that in fact it is my generation of fathers who have cocked things up so badly in this world:

• Our (love for/fear of) guns is so great that we cannot even talk about controlling them to protect our children from being shot in school without being shouted down, so our solution is to help them get used to it; 
• We have allowed hate to once again carve a foot-hold in discussions of public policy which now carry increasingly disturbing echoes of a fascist state, much like the ones our fathers once defeated in war;
• It is the policy of the fathers who lead this nation to intentionally inflict pain on helpless children who come to a land once defined by hope and which for them will now and forever be defined by cruelty and pain; 
• We allow more children to starve and be sick than any other developed nation on Earth, all so we can remain in a state of perpetual war with an idea which few of us could ever define; 
• Hell, we cannot even act to preserve the planet our children will inherit.

By nearly any measure you chose, the leaders of this nation have failed as fathers and as leaders and I am ashamed for all of us.