Happy Father’s Day

Fathers are the backbone of America;

I want to take a step back to acknowledge how bizarre it has become to celebrate single mothers on Father’s Day; I would much rather celebrate mothers on another day and have it be called… oh, wait a minute.

It has been a long overdue conversation to talk about how we need to bring back strong familial ties. We NEED men in the lives of their children. With a strong father in the lives of his children, kids are more successful. The single greatest factor in an individual’s life is the quality of their father. That kind of statement is fairly taboo these days but i assure you that there is a bountiful selection of data that can back that statement up but for the sake of appealing to the more emotional people, you can observe in your life and in the people around you the effect a father has.

A father in the home, a good father of course, is the best chance a person has for completing grade school, learning personal responsibility, learning stoicism, staying out of jail, and being more empathetic. That’s right, contrary to everyone’s strongly held belief fathers contribute more to the development of empathy than mothers do.

It is insane how much fathers mean in america and to any culture generally. Men are required to sacrifice themselves for anyone else. Men are required to provide a firm foundation for the culture. An analogy for this would be that men create cities, technology, and all manner of things, and women create the stop signs, the safety regulations, the outreach programs. Not literally of course, but it is at the behest of women that things are made safer and comfortable. Many of us ladies know the feeling of trepidation when our men does something dangerous. Its the maternal instinct. When I watched my man rewire the lights in several rooms i was keenly aware of every move he made. Most men are able to push through the burden of fear. That is necessary.

I’ve asked many men why it seems like they are so nonchalant, and the truth is that men are literally internally screaming. Women like me feel stress or anxiety and we unravel and fall into the arms of our men to keep us from completely coming undone and the veneer of calm and collection from the men is soothing. If the strong men in our lives fell apart like we often do, then dysfunction rapidly manifests in the absence of control. We require our men to internalize their feelings, to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Our collective callousness towards men forces them to be the firm structure that we need.

We require men to value themselves less than anyone else. For purposes of practicality it should be men and children first. Men are objectively more useful than women are, i say this with the broader context of men doing all the shitty things in life. That is not how we are wired though. Men do not have the same in-group preference that women do. Men are collaborative however and without the automatic in-group bias, they are able to collectively fall on the sword for the weaker men, for women, and for children. This is a noble sacrifice. We are descendants of twice as many women as we are men and that means a whole sea of men throughout history have lived and died by this one principle: men are not human beings, they are human doings. I wrote about how men aren’t even worthy of being cared about as victims. We require men to put everyone else above themselves.

And so I want to raise a glass to all the fathers out there working hard to raise the best children they can. The social experiment has failed, we know that the raising epidemic of single mothers is NOT something to be celebrated. We need fathers.
To all the men who were tossed aside by the family court system, I raise a glass for you as well and I will stand with you until things have changed for the better.
To all the men who want to be fathers one day, YOU are the single greatest influence on your child’s life. Their future depends on you, so pick a good woman and be the best man you can be. Cheers.