Fathers

I’m not sure we get a day this year

I’m all for celebrating good parents, whoever they are. And since good fathers are a rarer breed than good mothers in my experience, we should appreciate them where we can find them.

However, right now a lot of fathers are letting their kids down. Some of them think they agree with a movement that not only does not care about them or their families, it’s a movement that ultimately wants to swallow them up and enslave them in a dictatorship.

Most people who “agree” with Trumpism have no idea what it is. They have had their reality twisted through a fun-house mirror to view authoritarianism as safety; cruelty as toughness; and fascism as patriotism. Undue influence has been industrialized and deployed at scale through coercive propaganda and targeted at vulnerable groups, including aggrieved white men.

I don’t make excuses for fathers who have been caught in this web, especially if they have caused harm, but the majority are ordinary Americans who were injured and trapped by a psychological weapon of mass destruction. They need help, not enemies.

However, the dads that need to step up are the ones who are privileged enough to have escaped this trap, who know all about what’s happening, but just ignore it and hope it goes away on its own. Or secretly want it to succeed because it would benefit them.

That’s not good enough, guys.

I have made no secret of my preference for a woman-led society, given the mess men have made, but in the meantime being a dad is not just stopping your kids from running into traffic; it’s also doing your part to preserve a world you would want them to bring their own kids up in.

It’s no coincidence that the Nazis used “Fatherland” to describe the nationalistic caricature they wanted to replace Germany with. Hitler, of course, had no children of his own and murdered millions of them.

The strong man is an ancient archetype, with Trump being the most extreme example since Mussolini. Of course, the whole point of the strong man character is to conceal the weak man underneath.

There are a whole bunch of dads out there that would throw themselves in front of a bullet for their kids, but don’t want to speak up against this information war because they are afraid of calling attention to themselves.

We’re past that now, guys. This is not a drill. Dad up.