Father's Day: Fatherless, America's Top Domestic Problem

Townhall.com ^ | June 17, 2021 | Larry Elder

[Kaslin]

A new powerful new documentary called "The Streets Were My Father" features three Chicago men, two Hispanics and one Black, who grew up without fathers. All three did hard time for serious offenses, including murder.

The film, with no narrator, just lets the men talk. None blames "systemic racism." All concede they made bad choices, but choices nonetheless. All talked about the pain they felt growing up without a father figure to instruct, scold, guide, motivate and instill confidence and direction. I highly recommend it.

In Barack Obama's first book, "Dreams From My Father," he talked about the hole in his soul, having last seen his father, briefly, when Obama was 10: "There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise (Hawaii), and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn't tell me why he had left. They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed."

My brothers and I were fortunate. We grew up with two strong, hardworking parents, both born in the Jim Crow South. But when I grow up, most kids came from two-parent households. My father, on the other hand, never knew his biological father. A man named Elder was in his life longer than most of his mother's boyfriends. He was an alcoholic, who routinely beat my father's mother and would beat my father when he tried to intervene. Dad's illiterate mother sided with her boyfriend during a quarrel with my dad and threw him out of the house at the age of 13. He never returned. This was in Athens, Georgia, deep in the Jim Crow South, at the beginning of the Great Depression.

He took a series of menial jobs before becoming a Pullman porter for the railroads. As a porter, he traveled all over the country and was amazed when he traveled to California, where he eventually relocated, and could actually walk in the front door of a restaurant and get served. My father joined the Marines, did duty in Guam during World War II and became a staff sergeant in charge of making sure the "colored" troops were fed. When he returned, he sought a job as a cook but was told, "We don't hire (N-word)s." So, he worked two jobs as a janitor and cooked for a white family on the weekends. After a grueling day of work, he attended night school two or three times each week to get his GED. He took courses on restaurant management and then started a small cafe when he was 47 years old, an ancient age for a first-time entrepreneur. The cafe was successful. He owned the property and bought some rental property before retiring in his early 80s.

He tolerated no excuses and always gave my brothers and me the following advice: "Hard work wins. You get out of life what you put into it. You cannot control the outcome, but you are 100% in control of the effort. Before you complain about what somebody said or did to you, go to the nearest mirror and ask yourself, 'What could I have done to change the outcome?' And, no matter how hard you work, how good you are, bad things will happen. How you respond to those bad things will tell your mother and me if we raised a man."

I wrote a book about the eight-hour conversation I had with this crusty old Marine, whose old-school discipline my brothers and I did not appreciate at the time. The hardback is called "Dear Father, Dear Son," and the paperback is called "A Lot Like Me."

Several readers who, like my dad, grew up without a father wrote to me and said that the book "changed their lives." Many readers who, like my brothers and me, grew up with tough Depression-era World War II dads said the book changed how they saw their fathers.

Fathers matter.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Oprah and 100 Black Fathers” features Oprah Winfrey as she speaks with 100 Black fathers about how they are emotionally managing this moment, the urgency of having “the talk” with their children and the dreams they have for their future.This in-depth special includes conversations with actor, filmmaker, philanthropist and media mogul Tyler Perry; award-winning actor and producer Courtney B. Vance (“American Crime Story”); Grammy award-winning rapper, song writer, entrepreneur and activist Michael Render pka Killer Mike; and criminal justice reform activist and author Shaka Senghor (“Writing My Wrongs”) as they share how they are responding and speaking with their children about the recent murders of Black men and women, and the deep-rooted systematic challenges they face in their daily lives living in a world that too often sees them as criminals instead of their humanity.

The virtual audience features fathers who are married, single, gay, parents of trans children, members of the military, the formerly incarcerated, frontline healthcare workers, professional and stay-at-home dads, and those who have faced the death of a child at the hands of the police.

[Gay State Conservative]

A boy who grows up without a father...or with a punk father...more often than not grows up to be a loser (or worse).Fathers are also important to girls as a model of the kindness and respect he shows to her and her mother. Without such a model she,more often than not,will wind up with a punk boyfriend/husband.

Decades ago Rat Party Headquarters decided that welfare was a right...no husband needed.So the girls who grew up without fathers decided that marriage was optional.

The result? Generation...after generation...after generation of hood rats.

[polymuser]

God and fathers as leaders in our homes goes against the progressive/leftist goal of dividing society and then becoming our humanist leader (Big Brother).

“God is dead”, Godless schools, feminism, the pill, no-strings sex, no-fault divorce, mommie welfare, now male bashing — all work toward the same goal.

[Tommy Revolts]

Most confusing day in the hood. Who yo baby daddy?

[punknpuss]

Father’s Day has to be an especially painful day for most black children. I think it’s heartbreaking that so few know who their fathers or grandfathers are and even fewer have a relationship. How does a child know what he or she is capable of without a father? On whom does a male child model himself unless it’s an older boy or man who exhibits strength? Liberals destroy everything.

[dfwgator]

[Tommy Revolts]

OMG I about choked on my coffee.

[Tommy Revolts]

It is sad but it is the Democrats policies that have destroyed the black family.

A large percentage of blacks continue to vote Democrat though.

[Truthoverpower]

My kids have seen either dad leave for work pretty much every day at five 5:30 in the morning every day of their lives

Even during the Covid bullshit I still laughed every day in the morning before they would get up to go for school just to show them a model

As a father your role to your children it’s all about modeling

A key part of this modeling is complete and total support for the mother of the children

The mother makes the decision and is in charge and the father backs her up completely

That’s the mother has complete another authority over her kids

That is the way I interpret it

The Bible is very clear

[MomwithHope]

Since Biden has renamed Mothers “birthing persons” then what would they call Fathers? Person seeders? Any suggestions out there?

[KC_Conspirator]

Or today its “I don’t need no man” including a father in the house.