Tag: father

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crime and punishment responsibility

Race to Fatherlessness

fatherless men

“Attention is a limited resource,” Josh Oldham tells fellow Good Kid Productions co-​founder Rob Montz, “and in a moment of crisis,” after the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “a lot of Americans” accepted a “race narrative” about the incident.

In a new documentary, The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Lies We Still Live, Oldham and Montz present “7 sacred tenets” of the race narrative advanced by the media that were verifiably false. 

Those bogus beliefs “inspired thousands of protesters to descend on Kenosha” so that the city was “incinerated by a lie,” leading to 17-​year-​old Kyle Rittenhouse’s infamous visit to protect people and property, wherein he shot three men, two fatally … in self-​defense. 

Yet, the filmmakers don’t stop there; they offer “a deeper story.”

“Burn away the media-​manufactured fiction about Jacob Blake and what do you see?” asks Montz. “You see a bad man,” he acknowledges, “but you ought to also see an abandoned boy.”

Montz calls Jacob Blake “just one tiny data point in a mass trend” of “an unspoken catastrophe … the explosion in the number of boys who grow up without dads.” One of every three Americans boys is growing up without a father in the home.

Blake was hardly alone — Rittenhouse and both assailants he killed were were also fatherless.

“The thing that actually correlates most closely to whether a kid is going to go into a life of crime,” former Attorney General Bill Barr points out, “is whether or not they had a father who was involved in their lives.”

The moral plague that follows — of “unanchored” men — is a problem government seems mostly to have exacerbated. Only we dads can solve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with DALL-​E2

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general freedom national politics & policies term limits

Wise American Tradition

George Washington, resignation, king, father, term limits

On Sunday, former Pres. Barack Obama acknowledged — in the breach — the “wise American tradition of ex-​presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices and new ideas.” 

The former president’s talk at the University of Illinois made big news in large part because it was a direct attack on the current president.

“We have our first president, George Washington, to thank for setting that example,” Mr. Obama explained to the students. “After he led the colonies to victory, as General Washington, there were no constraints on him, really. He was practically a god to those who had followed him into battle. There was no Constitution.  There were no democratic norms that guided what he should or could do. And he could have made himself all-​powerful; he could have made himself potentially president for life. Instead, he resigned as commander-​in-​chief and moved back to his country estate.”

Noting that “six years later” Washington was elected president, Obama added, “But after two terms, he resigned again and rode off into the sunset.”

The two-​term limit, constitutionally imposed on modern presidents, was established as a tradition when self-​imposed by the man known as the father of our country.

“The point Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of, and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class,” the former president concluded, “… only citizens, who through their elected and temporary representatives determine our course and determine our character.”

On that, Americans across the political spectrum can agree. 

It’s called term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Illustration: detail from “The Resignation of General Washington, December 23, 1783,” oil on canvas, by the American artist John Trumbull.

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture moral hazard

The Damage Done

black, father, racism, children, race

In his Washington Post op-​ed, “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father,’” Mychal Denzel Smith argues that “responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression.”

He asks:

If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes where electricity, running water and food were never scarce, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren’t too exhausted to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said their lives were incomplete because they didn’t have a father, would they hold on to the  pain of lack well into adulthood?”

Hmmm. The first question answers itself. If all children get everything they “need to thrive,” it is assumed they’ll thrive. The second question is impossible to know … at least until the creation of that perfect utopia with universal material abundance, a flawless education system and indefatigable single-parents.

Fatherlessness is not just a black problem. And let’s agree there are great single-​parent (or no-​parent) homes as well as terrible two-​parent homes.

Still, fathers are nice. Oftentimes they help children thrive, in part by providing “electricity, running water and food” as well as “love” — both tough and nurturing. Proclaiming that fathers would not matter in a society where everything’s automatically supplied is … simple-minded.

Often called socialism.

Smith raises the issues of “racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures … the poisoning of their water.” He’s right: having a father won’t magically solve those.

But it would solve the problem of not having a father.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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black, father, racism, children, race

 

Original photo by Sunil Soundarapandian on Flickr