Happy Father’s Day
Father’s Day is the one day a year we set aside to remind the men in our lives how much we value their role in our family. Their love, support, and guidance helped us grow into the people we are today. Those life lessons follow us into adulthood. We can hear their words coming out of our own mouths as we talk to our children about responsibility, helping others, and standing up for our beliefs.
A lot of what fathers do for us are the day-to-day responsibilities that they shoulder, and those things frequently go underappreciated. Fathers are often associated with the long to-do lists of mundane maintenance that keep our homes and vehicles running, and chores like taking out the trash and mowing the lawn. Commercials encourage us to buy Dad a tie or a new power tool, leading to jokes that gifts for men aren’t so much presents, but rather tools to do more work. In fairness, many of our dads can be difficult to buy gifts for, often giving the response, “I don’t need anything” when asked what they want for birthdays and holidays.
Measuring the value of a father figure in your life is something that is best done in the aggregate. It can be measured not only in all things that went right in your life, but also in the absence of things that could have gone wrong. It is all the small moments when you needed someone to lift you up, someone to be there to encourage you, and yes, someone to warn you that you were about to make a mistake. It is in the subtle way that having a steady mentor and role model has influenced many of your decisions, which often takes reflection to appreciate.
The History of Father’s Day:
The valuable role men play in our families and communities is reflected in the history of Father’s Day. What started as a simple act of gratitude became controversial when tossed into the polarizing light of politics.
It all began in Spokane, Washington, when Sonoro Smart Dodd, a young woman raised by her widower father after her mother died in childbirth, attended a sermon on Mother’s Day. Inspired to honor her father, she arranged the celebration of the first Father’s Day on June 19th, 1910. Dodd’s idea for a Father’s Day was slow to catch on, in part because the association with Mother’s Day, which came with flowers and cards, did not appeal to men. Ironically, the other reason it was rejected was because of the commercialization of Mother’s Day (see our Mother’s Day blog) that caused Anna Jarvis to reject the holiday she had helped create.
For the next five decades, Father’s Day enjoyed sporadic support. Calvin Coolidge supported celebrating the holiday in 1924. Some groups continued observances, but it was not widespread until Lyndon Johnson recognized the day in 1966. Johnson’s proclamation is credited to the efforts of Assistant Secretary of Labor, later Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City during the Great Depression. His father abandoned the family when he was only ten years old and his family struggled financially. Moynihan worked to help support his family as he finished school. Graduating at 16, he was able to join the Navy and attend college. He attended graduate school in London on a Fulbright scholarship and went on to become President Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Labor.
Having struggled with his own feelings about his father, Moynihan was intensely interested in the effects of fatherlessness on children. He worked to investigate correlations between social outcomes and family structure, particularly the role of the father in the family. After many successes of the Civil Rights movement, Moynihan undertook a study of the effects of slavery and segregation, as well as new social programs like welfare, on the black community. He compiled this research into the controversial Moynihan Report that correlated social issues in the black community with historic discrimination and an increase in the number of single-parent households, which he blamed on perverse incentives in government welfare programs. Moynihan expressed concerns that being disqualified from receiving assistance if a man was in the home was forcing women to kick fathers out of the house.
Once the report became public, Moynihan became a divisive figure, heralded by some for insight into the importance of fathers and unintended consequences of social programs, but decried by others as a racist for his focus on fatherlessness in the black community. The controversy caused Moynihan to leave government employment, but not before inspiring President Johnson to proclaim the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day.
Moynihan returned to Washington during the Nixon administration. Still concerned with the importance of keeping fathers in the home, he worked with President Nixon to attempt to establish a basic income program to replace the welfare model of public assistance. While his program failed to pass in Congress, Nixon did declare Father’s Day a permanent holiday in 1972.
How Polarization Gets in The Way
Moynihan went on to become one of the longest serving senators from New York and is best known today for being a maverick, voting against his party on many key issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the bipartisan Defense of Marriage Act, and entrance into the Gulf War. His efforts to highlight the important role fathers play and create better government policies to support families gave us a holiday and something important to think about.
The story of Senator Moynihan is one of many examples in our polarized political atmosphere in which complex issues are oversimplified into false dichotomies so that politicians can create soundbites and ask voters to choose a side. In the case of Moynihan, there is no evidence that he was a racist, nor was his report a definitive study on the root causes of social problems.
There may have been errors and assumptions in his report, but rather than debating and correcting them, groups and politicians resorted to either condemning or lionizing him for his efforts. Moynihan’s report should have opened public discourse on problems in our communities and potential solutions that many people wanted. Instead, the hyperbolic rhetoric became the story, and the underlying issues he sought to address were lost in the name-calling.
This is particularly pressing in today’s social media climate. Short videos and posts invite people to make snap judgments without context and share them while the story is trending. There is a pressure to weigh in even if you’re not sure what the story is about or whether or not it is true. There are incentives to grow your following by jumping on a bandwagon and giving a hot take on the controversy of the day.
While many advocates strip issues of nuance, not because they don’t want to talk about it, but because advertising requires a short message that grabs attention quickly, some sensationalize issues to help their posts go viral. This kind of media tends to focus on the character of public figures instead of their policies. It highlights drama as politicians trade barbs instead of debating anything important. It has turned our politics into a perpetual food fight full of juvenile stunts for the cameras and high school name-calling. It is little wonder that Congress’s approval ratings have hovered in the teens for decades and more and more voters are leaving the two major parties to become independents and third-party supporters.
Honoring Dads and Leading By Example
As we celebrate Father’s Day this year and honor the important men in our lives. It is important to take a moment and think about how we can better bridge divides in our families and communities. We can honor them by modeling the values they instilled in us. While engaging in political discourse is an important responsibility of every citizen, we also each have a responsibility to keep that conversation honest and civil. We should ask ourselves whether some of the rhetoric we engage with is advancing our cause or just enflaming divisions. Is any of the media we follow accomplishing our goals or is it just isolating us from each other? In our fast-paced media climate, we need to slow down and ask more questions, listen more openly, and try to find common ground. If we can push aside the hyperbolic rhetoric and focus on issues, not characters, we can make meaningful change that benefits us all. Let us take this Father’s Day to celebrate the wisdom and values passed down to us by our dads and ask ourselves what we each can do better to pass them on.