Obama On Fathers

When John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States, many men still wore the easy to manage crew cuts they brought back from WWII and Korea. Some parted their hair left, right, or center but slicked down like their fathers. Throughout my childhood, I combed a big wave in the front as if announcing surf was up. By the end of the Kennedy years, my hair looked as much like President Kennedy’s as it could, what was called “the dry look,” while the market for the “greasy kid stuff” vanished. This was beyond politics. Remember Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich.

Barrack Obama’s Father’s Day speech has been reported with interpretations as if from a dart board. Racist. Throw a dart at a definition. Pandering for votes. Aim at an exit poll. Pardon my shameless understatement: U. S. politics is entirely too Balkanized. Let's put it this way. I have never voted Republican for an office that would serve in Washington, D.C. Nonetheless I say, just because something appeals to Conservatives does not make it wrong. Sometimes they are right. And sometimes somebody else is right. Barack Obama gets my vote for even trying to reach out beyond the boneheaded divisions crippling our politics.

Rod Williams, a former Nashville-Davidson County Councilman and self-styled “right-leaning, pragmatic, centrist, disgruntled Republican,” blogged from Tennessee, “Barrack Obama’s Father's Day speech was a breath of fresh air. The state of the Black family is such an incredibly sensitive matter, only a Black person can raise the issue.” In my first Paw Paw Bill blog that endorsed Barack Obama, I said, “There are things about my country that are broken and can only be fixed, wounds that can only be healed by the first African-American to be elected President.” Throw the darts anywhere you want. If you think fatherless children exist and suffer only in certain communities, look again.

Here are excerpts from the speech by Sen. Obama:

Too many fathers are missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and I know how true this is in the African-American community… that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households… that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.

We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception… that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one. I know what it means to have an absent father…. I was luckier than most, and had two wonderful grandparents from Kansas who poured everything they had into helping my mother raise my sister and me.

…black or white; rich or poor; from the South Side or the wealthiest suburb.... It’s up to us to say to our daughters, don’t ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It’s up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we give glory to achievement, self respect, and hard work. It’s up to us to set these high expectations…. meeting those expectations ourselves.

…we can pass on to our children…the gift of hope… that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter