For years I have admired the work and efforts of my Canadian friend Walter H. Schneider who operates as FathersforLife.org. I ask for a reference on another Canadian activist Ken Wiebe who is promoting Fathers.ca as a common FRM portal to create a common ground for all FRM groups.
I received an unanticipated response. It was perhaps one of the best assessments of the FRM I’ve read in years and worthy of serious thought. Walter begins by stating the need for applying the methods of systematic problem-solving to the men’s or fathers’ rights movement. In his words:
The major steps required to be taken are:
1. Problem recognition;
2. Problem analysis and solution design, and
3. Solution implementation and maintenance.
The so-called fathers’ rights movement (FRM) has not yet begun to develop a systematic process to identify what the problem is that ails our society. It is not even close to completing the first step of the problem solving process.
The major aspect of the product of that first step must be that all who participate in it must agree that there is a problem and on what its nature, history and consequences are. Moreover, they need to agree on what is required to move themselves and society from the existing state of dissatisfaction to the desired state of satisfaction. More specifically, they need to determine what that state of satisfaction shall be and that the will exists to attain it. None of that even closely exists in the FRM. The FRM has not even thought about any of that.
The majority of fathers’ rights activists (FRAs) are preoccupied with issues regarding shared parenting, child custody and access, child maintenance, and so on. All of those issues deal with problems that are nothing other than the consequences of separation and divorce.
Separations and divorces are symptoms of fundamental problem causes. One of those causes is the international agenda for the planned destruction of the family. The FRM rarely devotes time to thinking about that. Preoccupation with the consequences of problems obfuscates recognition of causes of the problems whose consequences worry us. That is sad. No problem has ever been solved satisfactorily or successfully by putting Band Aids on its causes. Successful problem solving requires the eradication of the causes of the problems that affect anyone.
There are pro-family organizations that increasingly have a national or international presence, with astounding growth rates — and virtually no FRAs ever heard of them on account of FRAs not being able to see the forest for the trees. That may largely be due to ignorance by most, but at least for a substantial majority of FRM leaders it is due to them not wanting to restore society’s respect for and appreciation of the institution of the family. They want equal or equitable shares of the fall-out of their separations and divorces. If you don’t believe that, then tell me where there is presently a discussion by FRAs on “no-fault” divorce and on the need for abolishing it.
FRAs have reduced themselves to negotiate, from the position of the defeated, the terms of their surrender in the war against the family. By stating that, I have no intention to insist that FRAs do not need to fight and struggle to address the inequities of the fall-out of divorce. However, as FRAs occupy themselves with that, they have absolutely no time for anything else, least of all for any work that strengthens families, communities and nations.
That is a major reason why FRAs receive little respect. They are perceived as working from a position of disgruntlement rather than from a position that is the basis for the promotion of the greater good for all of society.
For a little more on that, you should have a look at the mission of the fathers’ rights movement.
Against that background, where does Ken’s proposal fit in? What will it accomplish with regard to promoting the greater good of all of society? Even if the administration of Ken’s proposal will be effective, technically, what practical value will it provide? A “portal” for FR organizations, with a specific discussion forum for every single imaginable issue for tiny groups of like-minded individual who each individually meet and propound their opinions, with little and perhaps scarcely of any central message or agenda permeating or inspiring them all. It may be somewhat like interactive Cable TV channels, hundreds of them on a single feed, where anyone can surf the channels and select the discussion forum that fits his taste.
Cable TV has done nothing to promote a unified culture, but it has done a lot to further social, jaded and even brutal aberrations and to thereby erase the vestiges of the culture we once had (which is of course a big part of the implementation of the agenda for the “march through the culture” envisioned by Gramsci – and by others like him in the Frankfurt School who brought about the cultural revolution in the US, from where it then spread into all of the West and then to the rest of the world). It effectively legitimizes any social or moral aberration that is fit to be broadcast, with what is being fit for consumption being determined through constantly worsening and ever more degrading moral standards.
How will an FRM portal become an improvement on that? However, there will be one good outcome. It will be possible to eliminate all dissent amongst FRAs by sending every single dissenting group of like-mined individuals to a room of their own, right? However, how will that promote unity and a common and shared policy program to which every FRA is committed?
Ken is an outstanding FRA who has been and still is involved in some extremely important issues. It would hardly serve the FRM if Ken were to disperse his skills by quite possibly squandering them in promoting his scheme that most likely will at best do very little to promote unification of the FRM.
In the long run, FRAs matter very little and do nothing to help prevent the disappearance from view, within about four generations, of the cultural heritage (including the institution of the traditional nuclear family) that we had become accustomed to and even of the populations that once-upon-a-time adhered to that cultural heritage. We progressed from a culture catering to social progress to a culture of death.
I mentioned the pro-family movement of which virtually no FRAs want to have any part. That FRAs don’t is regrettable, because on account of that the pro-family movement is very much influenced by feminists and by feminists goals, doctrine and dialectics.
Now just a few words about current trends in social and political evolution.
The vast majority of FRAs is blissfully unaware of changes affecting those trends. Although feminist-imposed edicts addressing so-called women’s rights issues are very much a reality of every-day life, feminism has fallen into disrepute and is withering on the vine.
The feminist experiment with the family flopped and is one of the worst calamities that ever befell mankind. Our society is slowly waking up to that, even though that fact passes-by the vast majority of FRAs, instead of them taking advantage of that for the sake of the institution of the traditional nuclear family. One of the reasons for that is that many FRAs are in fact feminists or, if not, pursue the goals of feminism by actively or passively opposing the promotion of the traditional nuclear family.
That is an extreme irony. Restore the institution of the traditional nuclear family, and the status of men is automatically restored. That is nothing but common sense. It is reverse-social-engineering of feminism’s implementation of the agenda for the planned destruction of the family.
The feminist movement is dead. All that remains of it now are crones who are nevertheless still very influential in the powerful positions into which they installed themselves in all sectors of society during the last few decades. They will die or retire and be gone. Their positions will be taken by powerful women, and by powerful men who suck up to those women.
Men in society in general will remain in the position of second-class citizens that the feminists (there are more male than female feminists) created for them over the decades. Ultimately it will be fathers who will be left holding the bag. They already are and increasingly will be the Pariahs of society.
In my view it appears that FRAs do absolutely nothing to prevent any of that from happening — web rings or not, Fathers Canada portals or not.
There is quite a bit more to all of this, as all of it must be contemplated within the context of public opinion, of what passes for public opinion (the media) and of how the latter influences the first. In a nutshell, interest groups control the media and the message with which the media indoctrinates the masses. Accordingly, the masses then elect their “representatives” who are in fact individuals that please the media and please the interest groups who control the media.
Solve that conundrum and you will be able to restore the status of men. The feminists did something exactly comparable by creating a solution to an alleged problem, the perception of a lack of status of women, and by usurping (and even by creating) controlling positions in the media and in all sectors of society (including the churches).
Again in a nutshell, feminists preached their message for centuries and for more than a hundred years dominated and controlled the media and the delivery of the message to the masses. It is now time for the FRM (through the Internet) to deliver a new message that becomes the dominant one for the masses.
