Then there are all of my beautiful girls, my daughters and granddaughters and my wife. I will get to see only one of my daughter's today but the others are not disconnected, just farther away physically. Being a father to girls is really like trying to raise aliens in your garden, there is no mix of nutrition and nurturing that ever seems to get it right. But still you love them and try to make the best of the fact that you are as alien to them as they are to you. I am happy with all of my little alien flowers and their mom but I still understand only a small part of who they are and how they got that way.

My wife's father is in my mind this year, he died in February, and it is her first father's day without her dad being present. She misses him and loves him and wishes nothing more than that she could tell him that one more time. I miss him too; he was one of the finest men that I have had the good fortune to know in my lifetime. We were there with him when he died and she got to tell him she loved him and hold his hand while he breathed his last. She was present during his long illness and always available to comfort him during his decline into death. No one could ask more of a daughter than what she gave him every day during the last years of his life. It is in those connections and efforts over time that the relationship between children and their father is defined.

I never had a relationship with my dad, he died before I was nine and was institutionalized for insanity when I was three. I know a few things about him but there is no real sense of a person who gave me many of my traits both good and bad. It is in part through knowing our parents and their characteristics that we begin to know ourselves, that imperative of a life well lived. Know thyself, a good guiding phrase for parents everywhere and particularly fathers in our nation in these times.

We in this nation are participants in a process that is being called a war on terror. Fatherhood was invented to create security for children and families; in human history what we now call terrorism was often common behavior between combatants. I have no desire for my beautiful little alien flowers to face any of those great evils that all good men are trying to banish from the world. Violence done indiscriminately to noncombatants and particularly women and children is an effective way of cowing a population and bringing it to its knees.

Attacks on civilians have been used in warfare everywhere until very recent times; we used it in Vietnam with our bombing campaigns that could not discriminate between combatants and civilians. We did it in WWII in both Germany and Japan. We are trying to prevent what has always been used as a tactic in human warfare since time immemorial from being used against us. We are certainly within our rights in doing so but without universal recognition of international treaties designed to outlaw such behavior we are going to have a difficult time preventing its use. Fatherhood compels us men to demand that our government try to end that type of warfare. Patriotism requires that we do what we can to help end terrorism as a construct of war forever. Unfortunately those who are trying to impact our policies by using terrorism care little about those things. What we need here is a dialogue between parents in all nations about the difficulty of living in a world where governments and extra-governmental groups alike condone the use of violence against civilians as a means to an end. We need an international consensus to guide our government and theirs toward peaceful solutions to serious disagreements between nations and people within those nations. We need to come together as people, not governments and find the basis for a dialogue that can help formulate that consensus.
It is an increasingly dangerous world in which even SARS and Monkey pox represent new threats to us and our children and grandchildren. Small changes in either of these diseases would mean a massive impact on the world and millions if not billions of untimely deaths. Small changes like those that could be made with bioengineering tools available in very sophisticated laboratories today. Within a few years those tools will be available for a few cents on the dollar of their cost today and far more potent tools will enter our world through the portal of science. The danger inherent in these expansions of human knowledge will be exceeded by far by their benefits if we can cobble together a consensus of international opinion against use of any weapons whatsoever against civilians. Without that international consensus the weapons created by those technological miracles will threaten our very existence.

How do we go about creating such a consensus? A great deal of the work necessary to generate the perception of destruction of civilian life as evil and not permissible in war or outside of it has been done by religions. Every mainstream religion condemns such acts as evil and against their belief system. That includes Islam as well as Christianity, Buddhism and all of the others flavors of religion that are recognized by substantial numbers of people. Perhaps we can start working through the process of creating that consensus by starting with an effort across national boundaries through a faith-based initiative. In any case I propose that we fathers take on this task as part of how we create security for our families. It is a worthy task and can save our children much pain. It is my attempt at a gift to you and your families on this fathers' day, our first without Nene's dad, who was a man of god and a servant of peace. God bless and keep you and your families safe in this strange and difficult new world on fathers day now and in the future.