MrMary’s Father’s Day Rant: Happy Fathers Day

My sifu told me that to be a father means to work tirelessly and never be appreciated. Looking at a lot of articles lately like:

Are Father’s necessary, fathers (what are they good for?)
Are Fathers Necessary? A paternal contribution may not be as essential as we think.

I see that more and more ringing true socially as in my own life. I believe there is a reason why lately this idea of what is a man or what an ideal man should look like or what are masculine qualities what are feminine qualities has become so prevalent in so many conversations in America and places traditionally considered part of the West.

The narrative of being a male in the West has changed greatly over the last century. Now I can tell you all sorts of reason why; I can point out things like the emphasis on the nuclear family, industrialization and a diverse array of factors but no one has time for that. My belief is that we are drowning in information, we have statistics on what happens to children in homes without fathers vs those in homes with. Someday those results are right some days they are wrong, some days they sounds hopelessly not even in the ball park like comments like this:

The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution. The good news is, we’ve gotten used to him.

Some More thoughts

I think it is pertinent to bring up the example of Diogenes the Cynic looking for a man at noon with a candle in a busy market. I think that story applies to our times. What is a real man ? What is a real father ? What the average dad’s address ? Are the methods by which I am trying to answer these questions , like a candle at noon, good enough to help me answer my question ?

I always even though I work in science and have been prepared to do so since my early childhood, I tire of statements like “Statistics have shown that …..”. Statistics have there place don’t get me wrong and are vital to the process of discovery and understanding but ….

“The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.”

– Carl Jung The Undiscovered self.

What are we Really Celebrating ?

I wonder what are we really celebrating on father’s day. I went around asking people I knew what are we celebrating on Father’s day, and I was told “fathers” and given a look like I was crazy. But what does a father mean nowadays – how can we celebrate anything we are, or a significant portion of us are undecided on that we really need ?

Father’s Day to me is farce! It is absurd. The commercials create this fictitious dad based on consumer and marketing statistics that we project all our psychological conditioning on. It is many a times this fictitious dad that we really buy the same bullshit ties, grills and fancy 6 packs of craft brews. The fictitious dad loves hardware tools, he loves grilling meat and scratching his nuts in the most obvious way while watching football games/baseball games on tv. He is resigned to a chair in the home and when he is home is only a husk of who he used to be.

Today’s Fathers

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar