Who is your daddy?

The operative question should be who is daddy? It dawned on a couple of us that mothers continue to overshadow fathers in most families. Flipping though the what-ever they offer, local television stations and heard a song about how special moms are being played White Blackman Television. For a moment it was a wake up call. However, the operator quickly changed the selection.

The media continues to depict fathers in all the shadowy roles. In all the news, fathers are thieves, gunmen, rapists, child molesters, drug addict, unfaithful, uncaring and more recently, terrorists.

Where are all the good daddies; the ones that work blood, sweat and tears to make it right for the family, the fathers who never make it onto the pages of the newspapers or the headlines of the late night news?

There are hundreds of songs recognizing the contribution of fathers, but just a few singers have pulled the notes for their fathers.

“Pappa was a rolling stone” is apply used by mothers in the US to described fathers, especially those in low to middle-income afro communities. Closer to home, there are mothers who end up on the wrong side of the law. Just Friday one Acting Magistrate remanded some ten women.

The stereotypes in society make it fine for a woman to walk on a man because everyone feels that it’s the fault of the poor guy. When a woman gets pregnant, the cry is always about the man giving her a child or the man “breed her” as typical Guyanese would say. It takes two to get pregnant and this society needs to stop stigmatizing men.

It is a male dominated world and one of the ways sexists women try to overcome this is to promote gays and paint all men with a broad brush, often leaving no strokes as they paint over the good character of most men.

Women hurting by a man often live to tell a tale of meeting a beast, but that’s ok.

I have had the privilege of calling the greatest person dad. I couldn’t measure if my mom was greater, but dad has stuck throughout the years, riding our emotional roller coaster steering it away from danger on countless occasions.

To him, the dads of all of our staffers, and all those single parent dads around the world, Guyana 360 salutes you.