Posts Tagged → bravery
Happy Solstice Father’s Day
Father’s Day 2026 coincides with the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice. In traditional societies, both winter and summer solstices are central to religion and culture, often gathering people together for initial crop harvests, or for winter-time prayers for a successful coming-year crop yield.
Is it not meaningful or symbolic that celebrating Fatherhood got the longest day of the year in 2026? After all, fatherhood, which is also stewardship, careful management, husbandry, a pile of other synonyms and principles for judicious oversight and watchfulness, is central to any successful family and enterprise?
Fathers have always been central to healthy families, and there is no reason to artificially exclude dads now from healthy families.
About twenty years ago, a dear old friend from Penn State emailed a photo of a single mom, tattooed and pierced, holding her young child. An early form of meme, the photo’s caption said something about how women don’t need no stinkin’ men in their lives and can do everything just fine themselves. It was an angry feminist attack on men in general, and on fatherhood specifically, summing up the then-spiraling and now-spiraled-and-disintegrated state of American society and family alike.
Boy, or man, did that meme age poorly! Nowadays, even the most ardently leftwing sociology professor is acknowledging the necessity of two-parent homes for having children grow up into healthy, adjusted, functioning adults. The data today is simply overwhelming: Men and women together build the soundest, most resilient families. Everything else is somewhere on a Bell Curve’s downhill slope toward failure.
Historically, Dad was both provider and defender. In a world of fang, claw, and tooth, the mighty arm of Dad could wield a spear, a knife, a sword, and keep hairy death at bay. And because both hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies are based on human muscle, Dad’s brawn was central to family survival.
Today, in the West, Dad has been re-invented, mostly against his will and against his interest, against the interest of happy and healthy families. Part class clown and all goof, Dad’s role in popular culture has taken a steady beating from the far-left anarchists running American academia and media. But nature has not changed, and human nature has not changed, and despite heavily promoted fuzzy notions of utopian lifestyles, do-it-all moms and super-women, Dad is still just as needed today as he was a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago.
If nothing else, a hundred thousand years of human evolution still wants, needs, the comfort of Dad’s words, his encouragement, his bravery, leadership, risk-taking, his steadfast commitment to his family. Not every Dad is up to the job at 100% all the time, but just showing up every day is about 75% of the job. And like in baseball, batting 75% is pretty damned good. Most kids will cut their own Dad some slack, if they believe that he has tried to do his best to be the father they needed.
Thanks, Dad and Dads everywhere. We all love you and we all appreciate you. You are the longest day in our lives, because you have the heaviest influence on us. Hopefully, Dad uses his influence for the good and health of his family. After all, that is being a Dad…