If to live means to shut my mouth,
And speak naught against evil and hate;
If to live in peace means to close my eyes,
to the bigotry and greed that prevail;
if to live in peace means to plug my ears
When the woe-begone weep at my door;
Then I'm not content to live in peace,
But would rather I live at WAR!
For to live in peace means to open my mouth,
And to speak out for righteous and true;
For to live in peace means to uncover my eyes,
To act - to kill wrong in its youth;
For to live in peace means to unplug my ears
When the call of the oppressed is heard;
It will only be when these rights I possess,
That I can live completely unstirred.
By Geraldyne F. Lee
My aunt wrote this many, many years ago. I often glanced at it while it hung on the wall of my parent's home as I grew up but never knew what it meant. After my divorce in 2008, I asked if I could take a copy of the framed poem from their home back to New York.
When I read it today, it speaks volumes.
Divorce can have a significant impact on a family. It can affect you emotionally, psychologically, and especially financially. My treatment in family court influenced me in every possible way, including spiritually. I had a complete change of consciousness after seeing injustices occurring in the family court system firsthand. I couldn't believe what I saw.
As I walked out of the courthouse after my settlement on July 9, 2008, I realized that I had battled not only my ex-wife but I won a war with a highly biased court system. I was determined. Nothing was going to stop me from keeping all of my money, but more importantly, complete access to my children. I knew it was best for them to be with us equally. I would never be a 'Disney Dad' and see my kids every other weekend, and I sure wasn't paying anyone child support.'
After several therapy sessions, months of reflection, and years of research, I began to figure things out. It dawned on me that we have many unrealistic expectations concerning marriage and divorce in our culture. Most people seem to think that if, for instance, things don't work out with you and your partner/spouse, you get divorced, the father leaves, and the mother receives child support or spousal support. The kids see their dad every other weekend. Everything will be ok after that.
It won't.
I began writing about my experiences and found my essays were reaching people in ways I hadn't considered. People would connect with me through various blogs I had over the years. Some of these people are friends with me today. I understood every divorce was different, but there were common threads through most of them. When I expressed myself and began questioning conventional wisdom, I had a way of connecting with like-minded individuals - primarily survivors of the cruel and unjust system of family court. With my writing, I could make a difference in people's lives. When people read stories related to their own experiences, they discover new online communities and groups. I later found myself becoming an advocate for divorcing fathers.
I focused my time and energy on writing and eventually discovered organizations updating the domestic relations law in my state. Again, I found my voice as well as an outlet to bring about change. My new passion was to elevate the level of discourse around fatherhood and change matrimonial law in my state.
After my wife and I agreed to a settlement, I started doing some research and learned about the legislative process. I also began having conversations with divorcing fathers who reached out to me after reading my essays. Many of these fathers, unfortunately, did not know what to do during their divorce proceedings. These men kept receiving poor advice from their lawyers, friends, and family. It appears they knew no other alternative than the scenario I described above.
After studying the history of divorce, I became more interested in how relationships could be improved. I asked myself; why must kids miss out on individual family relationships when parents separate? It's cruel for children, who love both parents, to suddenly lose access to everything they once knew when their parents no longer want to live together. Does a child's love and need for both parents abruptly end when parents decide to separate?
When parents split, even if it's amicable, it's a traumatic event. It's hard for parents, relatives, friends, and especially children. Barring exceptional circumstances, a child's right to both loving, fit parents should not be allowed to be used as leverage against the other.
Our culture needs a drastic paradigm shift. It's time to stop seeing one parent as the default and the other as just a visitor. These assumptions are often sexist and outdated. If the parents can no longer live together, the next best thing is for the child to have equal time with each parent - shared parenting.
Shared parenting establishes a presumption of joint custody when parents separate. Having shared parenting as the default in each state would create a default starting point for divorcing and separating parents. Judges should not have their hands tied. They should retain the ability to rule otherwise when one parent is demonstratively unfit and especially in instances where one spouse is found guilty of domestic violence or abuse. The presiding judge must show clear and convincing evidence as to their reasoning for any deviation. Those judges should also be held accountable for their decision.
Bottom line? When both parents are fit, where there is no abuse or neglect, shared parenting should be a default in each state – rebuttable with clear and convincing evidence.
I see a direct link between our divorce culture and widespread fatherlessness. Poverty, crime, sexual promiscuousness, gang culture, drug dependency, domestic violence, and a host of other social ills are symptoms of the more significant problem that stems from generations of children growing up without fathers in the home. Unfortunately, we seem to have lowered our expectations of what is acceptable. The realization that our society is comfortable with normalizing fatherlessness has been a wake-up call for me.
We need to make significant cultural changes to strengthen the family bond that I see being systematically dismantled. The contributions the mother and father make with the rearing of children are equally important. The time has come to rethink the way we handle divorce, especially when children are involved. I certainly did. I am living proof that there are alternatives to conventional wisdom.
I cannot live in peace until there is a radical shift in consciousness concerning the importance of men and fathers. Instead, people insist on writing men out of the picture, but I insist on debunking this myth and proving why fathers are needed.
I cannot live in peace until I see a bias towards mothers eradicated and fathers are treated with equal respect in family courts. The absence of fathers has caused decades of havoc in many black communities. Fatherlessness is now affecting our larger society.
I cannot live in peace until our city, state, and federal domestic relations laws are modified to reflect modern life in America. There will be no peace if fathers are continuously pushed to the margins of family life.
I can only live completely unstirred when our culture views fatherhood as essential.
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Follow him on Instagram, Twitter or read more on his website: claytoncraddock.com
The taxation of personal incomes reduces all human beings to state property, and facilitates a mindset in the 'public sector' that all human activities are mere privileges, to be defined, altered, suspended or denied at the state's whim and purely in the state's interests. All the evils of omnipresent and meddling officialdom stem directly from this poisoned tree. There will never be any such thing as genuine freedom for the individual to live life as one sees fit, until enough people have the self-respect and moral courage to STOP allowing a regime to monitor their fiscal affairs with the sole aim of forcing the people to be subservient to government. This power, once granted by those who blindly capitulate year after year to the piracy and espionage that is 'income tax', translates into every other kind of official power premised on the notion that it is people who serve government rather than vice versa. If you really want to break the power of the state to interfere in your personal life (and I can think of no more vivid example of this power than the state's arrogant presumption in using court orders to determine the future of children regarding their own parents), then you have to start by telling this 'IRS' gang of thieves that it will no longer be allowed access to your finances nor be rewarded with the power to fine you for making a living. All the wishful thinking and convoluted political sophistry in the world will never make the state serve the interests of the people instead of using its powers solely to enrich and insulate its own separatist caste of privileged functionaries. Sooner or later, Americans will be left with only two options: to tell anything having to do with 'government' to go fuck itself, or live as slaves to its random and arbitrary edicts. I have long suspected that most Americans actually despise and fear the very notion of personal liberty and will do whatever they must never to have to exercise it. The path of less resistance in this evil arrangement is to pretend to obey all the state's demands while doing everything possible to defraud and deceive it to personal advantage, which is the closest thing to a genuine definition of any 'American Way' I can recognize: lie, cheat, cook the books and launder the money according to whatever keeps the state contented, and pile on the artifices of consumerism to try and make the gagging stench of universal corruption a tad less unbearable.
Amen