Father’s Day

Posted by Bill Hennessy on June 18, 2006 under Uncategorized |

Perhaps you find it odd that my 13-year-old and I decided to begin Father’s Day watching “Band of Brothers” for the umpteenth time. To someone of my generation, though, it makes perfect sense. The greatest movie about the greatest generation gives us our sharpest view of the men who raised us.

By “men who raised us,” I don’t mean mere male homosapiens. Those are a dime a dozen and not worth our time considering. I men “men” in the poetic, heroic sense of the word. Men who left school to make money for their families during the depression, left their families to fight evil around the world before their twentieth birthdays, returned—some—to a very different America, and made up for twenty years of neglect by inventing everything that we now think of as technology and modern practices.

In a sense, my dad and his generation invented the country we think of when we think of America. The social, economic, business, military, entertainment, and literary shape of our country began anew in 1945. While leftists with no senses of history like to point to the sixties as the great divide, they are wrong. Their egomaniacal myopia dims their view of the real shift our fathers engineered. Perhaps the boomers give their fathers so little credit because of their familiarity with the kind. We see our dads as the guys who come home from work at 4:30 and watch Cronkite on the news with footage of a fire fight in a jungle. We hear them mutter under their breath, “God help them,” as chiaroscuros of wounded soldiers and Marines crawl across the 18-inch television screen. We didn’t realize, at the time, that our dads’ muttering weld up from first hand knowledge of what those kids in the news footage� were going through.

On Father’s Day, watch “Band of Brothers.” You’ll learn something about being a man. If you don’t have HBO or the DVD collection, find a WWII vet. If that vet is your dad, thank the good Lord—you are truly blessed, like me.

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