The Once and Great Father’s Day

Mother’s Day, 2018, is now behind us. Next up is Father’s Day and, for a huge number of children, it will never arrive.

An article in US News and World Report by Lee Habeeb tells the story. When you cut to the chase, it’s a story about biased media reporting.

Let me explain. How many hours of reporting did we read or see on TV regarding the horrid Parkland shootings? But the story we don’t hear about is the staggering fact that almost every week in Chicago more kids are shot than were shot in the last 3 school shootings COMBINED.

Where is the media coverage? Where is the outrage from Black Lives Matter? Where are the idiots who blame Parkland on the NRA?

They are of course nowhere to be found, and not only because Chicago suffers under the most stringent constraints on gun ownership in the nation.  Why no media? Why no protesting (think about that?)

Chicago may be one of the most egregious examples, but it’s far from the only major city where black-on-black shootings have become epidemic. These cities all have two things in common: 1) liberal Democratic leadership; and 2) a huge percentage of fatherless kids.

And that's where the idea of Father’s Day is increasingly irrelevant to an alarming number of our young people.

Half a century ago the national ‘out of wedlock’ birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%, and within the black community, it skyrocketed to over 70%. Just think about that number; almost 3 out of 4 babies born in black communities are born to single moms. 

So, while we have lots of good reasons to celebrate our mothers, it’s way past time we focused on what it means for children to grow up without fathers, and what we do about it.

It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that cutting the percentage of fatherless kids from 70% to something more like an almost tolerable 20% would sharply reduce the number of black-on-black shootings.  

Any social worker, or teacher, or minister will tell you that kids (boys AND girls) who grow up without a father seek a replacement. More often than not, they find that replacement in the most unhealthy of all possible places — among the leadership of violent street gangs. Sadly, things usually turn very badly from there … drug addiction, prison time, and often the deaths of our kids.

I don’t have a lot of answers. What I do know is that if we paid as much attention to the weekly plague of shootings in America’s cities as we do to school shootings we might see real progress in saving thousands of kids trapped in fatherless families. But so long as the shootings in cities like Chicago and Baltimore predominantly affect blacks, and so long as those cities are run by liberals, that attention isn’t likely to come.

How sad!