Rodney's Herald on Sunday column today is about his Dad and how important our Dads are. How they guide us and set an example. I am also blessed to have one such Dad. And I can bring to mind two people who lost their Dads in the past year who felt exactly like Rodney and I about them. Good men themselves.
Then I had lunch with a friend just returned from where her father lives who didn't even visit him. Can't abide him and was forced to explain to the aunties why. Because he violently abused her mother and siblings and she will not forgive him. Never. And without him she'd gone badly off the rails as a youngster (not that she ever seems to particularly rue her 'colourful' past.)
Last week Sam took a photo of her Dad and me as part of a social studies project. It's something to do with photos of everyday things that matter - a favourite meal for instance - to send to a school in another country. I wondered out loud how many of her fellow pupils would be able to send a photo of their Mum and Dad together. She in turn identified out loud which friends could. About half. I told her how when I was her age I didn't know anyone, not a friend, not a neighbourhood kid, who didn't live with both parents. Bar one whose mother had died.
Isn't that a phenomenally rapid social change. One generation. And we know the downsides. The wealthier kids materially weather the upheaval better but that's about it. And I'm not condemning people who split. Intolerably unhappy relationships should be abandoned. But the widespread nature of breakdown goes far beyond what should naturally occur. Or what would naturally occur without government interference.
Muriel Newman: Submission on the Fast-track Approvals Bill
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1 comment:
Hi Lindsay
Yes, family is more than a 'social construct' that can be abandoned, reworked and replaced by the State at will.
Likewise marriage is more than a genderless feeling that exists between two (or more) people who love each other.
Some things once broken, are very difficult to glue back together.
If I may quote former USA President, George Washington;
'It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible. Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are the indispensable supporters. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that our national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.'
Of course we can exclude religious principal 'for a season' and live off the intergenerational inheritance we have been handed down. However, we are now in the autumn of that experience, and short of a 'rediscovery' of our religious cultural roots, we are destined for a difficult winter.
Dads or no dads.
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