Dads Against the Divorce IndustryDA*DI is devoted to reinstating the societal valuation of Marriage and the traditional, nuclear American Family, with particular emphasis on the essential role of FATHERS. DA*DI offers contemporary reports and commentary on culture; its aberrations and its heroes. |
|
by Kevin Kreneck / L.A. Times Syndicate June 20, 1999 / Published in the Detroit News Father’s Day is a holiday of the 20th century, an era of change so swift that one can sometimes wonder what remains of the past . Fathers of the 19th century provided for their children what fathers have provided from time immemorial: Food, protection, guidance. But technology and the welfare state have put children’s material needs within the reach of most working mothers. What remains of today’s father may seem a man tied to his child simply by love. Yet there is nothing unmanly in this. The tenderness summoned by the “patter of little feet” has long been part of the father’s domain; indeed, the phrase comes to us from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the grizzled, 19th-century poet, through his gentle poem The Children’s Hour. Or consider Rudyard Kipling, the archetypically masculine bard of the British Empire. Author of the famed poem If, a no-nonsense sermon to a son facing manhood, he also saw how love for a child shaped the father. In his novel Kim, an old sage grows wiser through his love of the orphan boy he adopts; in Captains Courageous, a powerful industrialist becomes a better man when he discovers his love for — and his need to mentor — his son. “Ah! what would the world be to us,” asked Longfellow, “If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us/Worse than the dark before.” Kipling knew it to be true: He never truly recovered from the loss of his two sons. Longfellow knew it differently, gaining sustenance from his six children as he raised them alone after his wife burned to death before his eyes. In 1898, another man, now unknown, also survived the death of his wife and went on to raise his six children. In 1910, in tribute to him, one of his daughters, Sonora Louise Smart Dodd, persuaded the city of Spokane, Wash., to celebrate the first Father’s Day. Thus do fathers and their children sustain one
another and find courage through love, as together they beat new
paths through changing times. The presence of good fathers ensures
it will ever be thus. Happy Father’s Day.
Dads Against the Divorce Industry
|
home
marriage &
family
moms, dads,
kids
current
affairs