An Open Letter to Fathers: scaling our legacy across generations

Father’s Day 2017: 18 June 2017

We live in a world of fictions, some petty, some so enormous that they enslave millions of people. Not the dime store novel varieties of fiction ??, as enjoyable as those, or their movie versions ??, may be. A simple example of a globally accepted fiction is the sun rises in the east & sets in the west.

As anyone involved in weather, satellite communications, marine navigation or a host of other fields will tell you, because of the earth's rotation around the sun, our star's relative position at sunrise shifts incrementally from day to day, in patterns so consistent that people quite literally ‘set their clocks’ by the sun’s position for centuries. Naval midshipmen still learn manual celestial navigation because at sea without modern GPS, the reference points God created can mean the difference between getting home safely or not at all.

Most of our maps (or sometimes even globes ??) are another kind of fiction. When people use maps, the vast majority use them to get from point A to point B, right?

The famous and endlessly repeated London Underground style of metro rail map shows not the true train route; in some cases that would resemble the Texas coastline! The truth of every detail would obstruct useful understanding for the vast majority of people. They want the hole, not the drill, as economists say so often, right?

Ceteris paribus, the cool Latin expression in economics meaning ‘[other | all] things being equal’ describes how we hold other things constant, to focus on a change we want to study, like sunrise or train movement. We treat these petty fictions as if they are real, because it equips and enables us to get on with our real mission in life.

As Catholic Christian fathers, our timeless mission is equipping and enabling our children to live lives of heroic virtue, so that they make it to Heaven. Especially our sons, for whom we are divinely commissioned to be their heroic example. Some lessons are delivered in an instant, others take a lifetime.

It may take but 20 seconds to plant a acorn, yet 20 years to see the oak reach its full magnificence. So with families and fatherhood. Are we paying enough attention to the seconds, so that the years will take care of themselves? Are we scaling our attention to give the best of ourselves in relationships and the leftovers to our devices?

Are we ‘present’ emotionally, spiritually, physically for our sons? Are there barriers that prevent that three-ply cord of father-to-son presence?

For every scripture verse talking about a father’s rights, there are perhaps a dozen that speak of his responsibilities. First and foremost is the command (not just for fathers!), to love one another as God loves us. How often we fail at this on a daily basis! I was at a men’s retreat recently where I ended my personal story with the idea that each one of us in their own way, mirrors each others’ failings and if we think we don’t we merely lie to ourselves. The event leader rose to address the entire group commending me on the power of that truth.

He that complies against his will

Is of his own opinion still.

~Butler

Take this for what it is worth. It is worth infinitely more than any amount of money. Money can never buy our way into Heaven. In fact that mistake is so often expressed, the church coined a name for it: simony! How many of us, in our practical daily lives, operate as if money is more important than relationships? How sad and how varied is the list of businesses, sports teams, marriages and even our own civic institutions, when lust for power, fame, money or other man-made artifacts of life obscure real states-manship to which all fathers are called?

The future of peace in the world comes through the stable, two-parent family. This objective truth comes from the exhaustive 1934 study of 86 civilizations across 5000+ years of human history. Woolly-minded Utopians of every stripe have vainly attempted to cast off all restraint and create a series of fictions about money, about morality and about family that have caused nothing but carnage. In our world of Father’s Day 2017, we see this carnage all around us.

• Money is merely a means of exchange. It has no worth in itself, outside of a transaction. Value resides in people and healthy relationships. Nor is money evil by any means; capitalism has produced better lives for more people than any other concept ever tried. It is the love of money, of ego, of pride that destroys the human family. Fiat-based currencies with fractional reserve banking are fictions created by private entities with the complicit agreement of governments for the sole purpose of stealing sums unimaginable to the average bloke; as the Brits would say when the first central bank was created in 1694 in England.
• Stateside, Andrew Jackson resisted the push for a central bank, Abraham Lincoln famously issued greenbacks for paying civil war debts yet Woodrow Wilson agreed to the Jekyll Island Scheme in 1913. (Read pp. 3-9 & enjoy the 1933 adverts!) Show me where you spend your time and I will show you what you treasure.
• Morality: Many children find puzzles as irresistible as a cat finds catnip, so let the child in you figure out that 1/10 of Psalm 90:4 is 240 years. With Huxley's Brave New World in 1932 the fiction of tinkering with the family reached its literary zenith 238 years after the fiction of state-sponsored extortion with interest rates roughly 800% per annum, (video above; 1932-1694=238). It was also 1932 that Franklin Roosevelt swept the US electoral vote with 88.9%, then in 1940 & 1944 violated the Father of Our Country’s tradition of only two terms, so in 1951 the XXII amendment formalized the concept of holding Presidential power in check.
• Family: As fathers, who holds us in check? In Hudibras. (Part iii. Canto iii. Line 547) Butler writes He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still so to whom are we honest? What practices strengthen our commitment to humility? How wide is the circle in which we accept people as they are (not behaviors, their humanity as male or female)? What or whom do we truly treasure—and why? In other words, where is our heart on Father’s Day?

I've said many times: trust is the world's reserve currency, because it cannot be debased without extreme cost (reputation risk), nor does it tolerate deficit spending for long. This Father’s Day, let us commit to improving, strengthening, renewing, and where necessary, have the humility, courage and persistence of memory (with a compelling vision of a positive future!) to heal our family relationships. For some, it may look and feel funny at first to treat other people the way we would like to be treated, yet this yellow brick road is paved with gold.

Happy Fathers’ Day to all!