{"id":568652,"date":"2021-06-19T15:09:30","date_gmt":"2021-06-19T19:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=568652"},"modified":"2021-06-19T15:12:07","modified_gmt":"2021-06-19T19:12:07","slug":"elder-fathers-day-fatherless-americas-top-domestic-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/elder-fathers-day-fatherless-americas-top-domestic-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"ELDER: Father\u2019s Day: Fatherless, America\u2019s Top Domestic Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Felder-fathers-day-fatherless-americas-top-domestic-problem%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=568652&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/2D9238D9-89DC-4D1C-BCAA-22814FA0EC9B-1200x800-1.jpeg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"  style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p>A new powerful new documentary called \u201cThe Streets Were My Father\u201d features three Chicago men, two Hispanics and one Black, who grew up without fathers. All three did hard time for serious offenses, including murder.<\/p>\n<p>The film, with no narrator, just lets the men talk. None blames \u201csystemic racism.\u201d All concede they made bad choices, but choices nonetheless. All talked about the pain they felt growing up without a father figure to instruct, scold, guide, motivate, and instill confidence and direction. I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n<p>In Barack Obama\u2019s first book, \u201cDreams From My Father,\u201d he talked about the hole in his soul, having last seen his father, briefly, when Obama was 10: \u201cThere was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise (Hawaii), and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn\u2019t tell me why he had left. They couldn\u2019t describe what it might have been like had he stayed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>My brothers and I were fortunate. We grew up with two strong, hardworking parents, both born in the Jim Crow South. But when I grow up, most kids came from two-parent households. My father, on the other hand, never knew his biological father. A man named Elder was in his life longer than most of his mother\u2019s boyfriends. He was an alcoholic, who routinely beat my father\u2019s mother and would beat my father when he tried to intervene. Dad\u2019s illiterate mother sided with her boyfriend during a quarrel with my dad and threw him out of the house at the age of 13. He never returned. This was in Athens, Georgia, deep in the Jim Crow South, at the beginning of the Great Depression.<\/p>\n<p>He took a series of menial jobs before becoming a Pullman porter for the railroads. As a porter, he traveled all over the country and was amazed when he traveled to California, where he eventually relocated, and could actually walk in the front door of a restaurant and get served. My father joined the Marines, did duty in Guam during World War II, and became a staff sergeant in charge of making sure the \u201ccolored\u201d troops were fed. When he returned, he sought a job as a cook but was told, \u201cWe don\u2019t hire (N-word)s.\u201d So, he worked two jobs as a janitor and cooked for a white family on the weekends. After a grueling day of work, he attended night school two or three times each week to get his GED. He took courses on restaurant management and then started a small cafe when he was 47 years old, an ancient age for a first-time entrepreneur. The cafe was successful. He owned the property and bought some rental property before retiring in his early 80s.<\/p>\n<p>He tolerated no excuses and always gave my brothers and me the following advice: \u201cHard work wins. You get out of life what you put into it. You cannot control the outcome, but you are 100% in control of the effort. Before you complain about what somebody said or did to you, go to the nearest mirror and ask yourself, \u2018What could I have done to change the outcome?\u2019 And, no matter how hard you work, how good you are, bad things will happen. How you respond to those bad things will tell your mother and me if we raised a man.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I wrote a book about the eight-hour conversation I had with this crusty old Marine, whose old-school discipline my brothers and I did not appreciate at the time. The hardback is called \u201cDear Father, Dear Son,\u201d and the paperback is called \u201cA Lot Like Me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Several readers who, like my dad, grew up without a father wrote to me and said that the book \u201cchanged their lives.\u201d Many readers who, like my brothers and me, grew up with tough Depression-era World War II dads said the book changed how they saw their fathers.<\/p>\n<p>Fathers matter.<\/p>\n<p><em>The views expressed in this piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><i>Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host. His latest book, \u201cThe New Trump Standard,\u201d is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, iBooks and GooglePlay. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an \u201cElderado,\u201d visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on Twitter @LarryElder. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new powerful new documentary called \u201cThe Streets Were My Father\u201d features three Chicago men, two Hispanics and one Black, who grew up without fathers. All three did hard time &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2280777,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/2D9238D9-89DC-4D1C-BCAA-22814FA0EC9B-1200x800-1.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"ELDER: Father\u2019s Day: Fatherless, America\u2019s Top Domestic Problem","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/2D9238D9-89DC-4D1C-BCAA-22814FA0EC9B-1200x800-1.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"ELDER: Father\u2019s Day: Fatherless, America\u2019s Top Domestic Problem","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2280777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}