Posts Tagged → fatherhood
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…
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One dad’s Father’s Day question to young Americans
Hi kids. Today is Father’s Day, a card company-inspired day for Americans to spend money on things like cards and gifts. It is a blatantly commercial event, but in the grand scheme of things, there are worse things to celebrate than fatherhood. Like an entire month dedicated to a person’s private sexual practices. I can make a strong case for June being Gardening Month.
Along with Motherhood, Fatherhood has been the guiding idea of the healthy and safe human family for probably close to a hundred thousand years: Physical protection from predatory animals and humans, life guidance in a world full of pitfalls and confusion, passing on skills and knowledge in a competitive world where making a living to stay alive and out of poverty is not easy. In short, fathers have been the other half of a successful family since the dawn of our species.
So don’t forget to call, email, text, or send a card to your dad today. Show some appreciation, even if your dad is occasionally foolish, an assh*le, selfish, whatever. The truth is, this man created you (with your mother), and you are here only because of him. Your life exists because of him.
So, in my role as a dad I have a question for the young people in America right now: Why are any of you supporting the main source of uncertainty that you face in the world’s greatest nation?
America went from a powerful and successful economy in 2020 to a continued and purposeful self-destructive free-fall from 2021 to today, with high inflation that eats away at the value of the Dollar in your pocket, fewer and fewer jobs, fewer good jobs, higher fees and taxes, millions of illegal invaders pouring over our borders who impose huge costs directly on you, and a huge amount of uncertainty now facing you.
There is just one source for all of this uncertainly: The political Left, which includes the mainstream media, academia, the government schools, the teacher’s unions, government bureaucracies, and the Democrat Party.
Not to mention all of the censorship, the attempt to control your words, your thoughts, your freedom to spend your money the way you want, your freedom to travel when and how you want. I could go on, but there is just one source for all of this effort to control everything you do and think and say: The political Left.
You say that abortion is your number one issue? Why? What on earth makes you feel empowered about ending the life of another person on demand, on a whim, without any thought or consideration? Don’t you think this is a weak approach to a literal life-and-death issue?
Did your parents treat you like a whim and just tear your little body apart and flush you down a drain? No, because you are here reading these words, probaby because your Father and Mother valued you and your presence on Planet Earth as a living human.
And if you think abortion is a constitutional issue, well, that has been dealt with in recent years. You can choose to live in a state that supports abortion on demand, if that is what is most important to you. As a dad, I find this a confusing motivator, but each to her own…just how many abortions do you plan on having?
For the constitutionally uneducated, abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, mostly because abortion was frowned upon for the vast amount of human existence. Especially in 1787, when the Constitution was being ratified. Children (like you, who were not aborted and are therefore reading these words here and now) were almostly always welcome, not seen as burdens.
But the argument can and has been made that abortion involves some self-rule over one’s body, because the Constitution blocks the government from having unfettered access to your person, place, and things, and it is hard to argue with that on principle. And so abortion has become legal in many places. This is the Yin and Yang of a dynamic America.
Consider how your perception of abortion rights compares to the general mainstream media discussion of self defense and firearm rights, which the Second Amendment expressly says “...shall not be infringed...” while in Pennsylvania our state constitution says the right to own and carry firearms “...shall not be questioned...” Universal abortion rights are presented as absolute and unquestioned, despite being found nowhere in our founding documents or debates, while the mainstream media complex constantly presents private citizens owning guns as completely up for debate, even though this is an actual right expressly enshrined in our founding documents.
This has been a bit of a digression from our initial question above, but the point has to be made, especially for young people: How you perceive yourself and your rights and your freedom and opportunities is largely influenced by the far-Left that has a death grip on academia, schools, and media.
As a loving dad on Father’s Day today, I encourage the young people who have stumbled upon this essay to really consider your future. Think hard and long about the causes of your scary future and the bedrock support most of us get from our family and dad. The political Left and its primary agent, the Democrat Party, is at war with family, with motherhood, with fatherhood, with your economic future and your personal freedoms and choices.
Everyone else is extending a helping hand to you. This essay is my way, as a loving, caring and understanding father, of helping you young people get your bearings. You know this, and you should vote like you know this.
To all the dads out there: Today we all salute you, and thank you, for doing your best to help guide us through our life.