...Can You Hear Me...

In thinking about the importance of fatherhood in the black community today and the importance of being a father and using your parenting skills on your children it has lead me to thinking and researching about the severity of the emotional and physical damage that takes place on a child and how as a culture we don’t appreciate the responsibility to be a parent.

At one point in American history millions of black men where stripped of their responsibility to raise their children when they where separated from their families during slavery. These men who valued their families and wanted to be apart of their children’s lives where taken away from their sons and daughters never to see them again. Their hearts where broken because they knew that their children would be forced into slavery and not only that but they wouldn’t have their father to guide them and help them deal with a difficult life.

We have a society that doesn’t punish fathers for being absent in their children’s life we tell them to pay child support and that’s enough. The value isn’t placed on raising your child and being present in their life rather it is if you pay your child support. I hope you can see the difference in that. And most of the time the little pay that is suggested by the court system is ignored.

We have become a society that has buried its morals and have bankrupted our children emotionally and spiritually because of our lack to be present and responsible to the children that we create. We sell them to the public school system rather than instructing them ourselves. We surround them with falsehoods that are sold as permanent when really the things they value should be eternal.

When appreciating where we have come from and the struggle of the people who came before us and what they endured I know they would be highly disgusted with our society and the lack of value we place on our roles as parents today. We murder our children through a legalized mass holocaust called abortion, we equate the value of time with our children to a check enforced on us by a judge, we allow a government ran politically machine to endocrine our children with philosophies that have hurt our society, we don’t value what black male slaves died for. They died to marry their wives and to have a family, they jumped over a boom in hopes to makes themselves feel special since the government didn’t recognize their love and now as black men when don’t think about marriage and respecting our women we thinking about not having a “Babies Mama”. These men fought for the family, they fought to just be allowed to be with their families and now we as a society have given up. If our child is having a problem we send them off to be taught how to behave from total strangers rather then parenting toward their individualism.

The men who came before us, the society of unfreed men who fought for freedom and for their children would be ashamed of us today. The graves are weeping for failed marriages, aborted children and fathers who don’t show up for their own. And to be honest with you the excuses have to stop. We can’t blame the children rather we must blame the lack of parenting. You don’t have to know everything to be a parent just show up and be present and give unconditional love and your best advice in the moment. Yes you will look back and say maybe I should have done things a little different but don’t look back and not be there.

For those who marched, for those who died and for those who wanted to be present but where separated from their families may we all as a society today hear your cries, see your blood and remember your pain that we may turn this tragedy into a victory.