Sticking the Landing:  A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

People protect what they love. Jacques Yves Cousteau

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent. Jonathan Swift

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. Zadie Smith

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness. Sidney Hook

If we do not step forward, then we step back. Paul Martin

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. Audre Lorde

There can be no lasting prosperity for our people, if we do not protect our planet. Rishi Sunak

Some of you who follow these posts have commented on their recent, relative infrequency.  This should not be interpreted as a sign of a reduced engagement but rather of circumstance as we continue to adjust in many ways – programmatically, logistically, financially to the changes brought about in some measure due to the long pandemic.  The passion persists; the urgency even more so.  But there is so much in our world generating urgency now, so many threats from which we need to offer protection, both in our own present and for the sake of our often-anxious progeny.  It is harder now to keep track, harder to prioritize, even harder to fashion cogent arguments for public consumption that don’t merely ply familiar personal and policy terrain.  

But this is Fathers Day weekend which for some reason I have long associated with protection.  Not because women don’t protect as well, but because our patriarchal worldviews have long assumed that the men would do the bulk of the protecting, occasionally through keen awareness, negotiation and compromise, but, quite unfortunately, often navigating protection at the end of clenched fists, the barrel of a gun, or worldly investments which accrue benefit only to a few.

The notion of protection seems quite straightforward at first glance, but for many of the best fathers I know it is anything but, a combination of attentiveness to matters of the moment with a lively sense of what the future may well hold for their progeny and what can be done to minimize the challenge and maximize the tools (financial, educational, personal) needed to meet the challenge or at least to give children a fighting chance to do so.

For even those fathers particularly skilled in the nuances of protection’s complexities, the words “messy and fraught” used this Saturday by the Washington Post, seem appropriate.  We can ensure that children are fed and hugged, educated and housed; that they are properly “ring-fenced with something stronger than empathy.” Moreover, we can also do much to ensure that they experience the personal skills they will need to practice over the course of their lives, the attentive understanding, generosity and compassion that they would wish for others to bestow upon them. 

But most of the fathers I know understand well that their ability to protect is limited even if bound within the domains of family and community.  To be sure, they cannot always protect from disappointment and failure, from humiliation and bullying, from anxiety and heartbreak.   They cannot always ensure that their children will embrace a calling appropriate to these difficult and dangerous times or (to quote that beautiful phrase of Audre Lorde) that they can keep girls and boys “from throwing any part of myself away.”

Beyond this, many of the fathers I know often lament that they cannot better protect children from the larger threats to their future — the new technologies and their weapons that we can create but barely control, the climate change and related biodiversity loss and ocean warming that portends more violent weather patterns and evermore silent springs, the pandemics which poise like wolves outside our seemingly-secure dwellings, waiting to blow away the plans and dreams of the unprepared and unsuspecting,

On top of all, we live in a time when fatherhood itself is contested space, when “men” are judged more and more by their most problematic examples, when even those who try to be the best fathers that they are capable of being find themselves too -often frustrated; struggling with life-partners living out a “different page,” displaced by the allures and influences of social media platforms and celebrity culture, worried that the financial and lifestyle sacrifices made to raise and educate their progeny will prove to be bets no safer than those made in Las Vegas casinos – close your eyes, cross your fingers, take your chances, and hope for the best. 

Never having had to raise children myself, I am always a bit hesitant to write about something I have never experienced, those hour-to-hour duties and worries that I can only participate in vicariously.  But I also know many fathers, some mostly satisfied, some also regretful, some eminently grateful for their blessings, some occasionally despondent at the lack of understanding and forgiveness from children who are likely to get over that difficult hump, if they ever do, only when they have children of their own.  It is indeed a “messy and fraught” business this fatherhood thing, implementing uneasy promises of protection in relatively small spaces as the bees struggle to pollinate, the fish migrate far from their biological homes in search of properly oxygenated waters, the air turns orange as the far-away forests go up in flames, the weapons continue to discharge in classrooms, and those who would deign to govern have seemingly thrown more of themselves away than any of the rest of us could possibly imagine doing ourselves.

I myself am no “father,” neither in biological nor religious terms.  But in our own “messy and fraught” manner, I and my colleagues have been consumed over many years with the responsibility to “make the world fit for children,” to enable and inspire care, to privilege equity and access across the global community, to help ensure that institutions like the UN not only assess threats to the future but act on them and do so collaboratively and decisively.  We and many others have tried despite a bevy of external and self-inflicted limitations to ensure that fathers and mothers can do their level best with children with some semblance of expectation that the world they are preparing for their children to inherit is worthy of that effort, a world that is greener, more equitable, more inclusive, more peaceful, more respectful than we have often been led to believe is possible.

This is all within the realm of the rhetorical, of course, and time spent (as we do routinely) within international organizations paints an uncomfortable picture of compromised policy urgency, endless half-truths emanating from officialdom, and processes content to examine and assess problems without a corresponding responsibility to urgently remediate the worst of their influences.  If fathers and mothers are ultimately to continue to “stick the landing” on parenthood, again to quote the Washington Post this weekend, they will need more, much more, from we erstwhile global policymakers:  more clarity and honesty about the messes we have collectively made for ourselves, more courage to move beyond petty politics and trust-related “excuses,” more determination to overcome our own follies and better translate idealistic words on a page to an embrace and support for the growing complexities and challenges associated with transitioning from one generation to another.

Happy Father’s Day, folks.  I can’t understand all that you go through, and surely do not wish to compete with the gifts some of you will get today in the form of thank-you cards, neckties and power drills, but know that we will continue to do what we we are able to help ensure that your complex and loving investments in our common future have the best possible chance of bearing good fruit.

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