Advocacy – Page 2 – Be a MAN! Take political action to support men.

Men want empathy – not sympathy

In an Op-Ed in the Epoch Times (https://www.theepochtimes.com/who-cares-about-male-suffering_3891890.html). Janice Fiamingo opens with the fact that July 11 is Gender Empathy Gap Day designed to bring awareness to societal indifference to the suffering of men and boys. She goes on to provide multiple examples which I encourage you to find in the article itself. What I found troubling as a MRA/FRA were the comments to “man up” opposite those that stated they had “sympathy” for men and boys.

I post a link to the difference between the empathy called for and the sympathy offered here, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sympathy-empathy-difference. As Ms Fiamingo point out, what we are looking for is EMPATHY, a simple recognition that men and boys who suffer are treated poorly by both men and women. You don’t have to have been victimized yourself and “feel my pain” and sympathize. You simply need to recognize the disparate treatment that men suffer and recognize it as wrong. As she plainly states this isn’t a victimhood contest between men and women, “it does seek to prompt recognition of our collective inability or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of men”.

The man up and don’t be a soy boy crowd is dismissing the issue out of hand without even looking to see if there is merit to the complaint. Of course attacking the “soy boys” allows them to avoid having to speak to the multitude of facts presented in the piece. Ironically this argument supports Ms. Fiamingo’s position that the societal indifference to the suffering of men exists. Having sympathy also can ignore the problem for feeling my pain and sharing my feelings does not necessarily translate into working to correct the problem which caused my pain.

Being a career law enforcement officer, I have never committed a crime with a female accomplice (it’s frowned on in my profession) and I don’t have sympathy for a criminal sent to prison as I’ve never been one. But if he was sent to prison and she given probation for doing the same crime I do have empathy for his disparate treatment which is obviously bias for being male. And in my 30 year career I was witness to and can attest to preferential treatment given to women by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges for both minor and major offenses.

In the olden days (1990’s) we used to have fathers rights meetings face to face. The “man up” crowd referred to them as “pity parties” and did not attend, dismissing the plight of others. The sympathy crowd would attend the meetings for the emotional support but wouldn’t get politically active to work to change the system. Regardless of their level of victimization by the system, it was those who had empathy for others who would fight for change. Parents, siblings, and second spouses were often the most vocal for change driven by their empathy for another.

Within the Men’s Rights, Fathers Rights, Parental Rights movements we see the same lack of empathy. Home schoolers and conservative Christians pushed the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act but specifically excluded “non custodial” parents from the act. When I co-founded the Coalition of Fathers and Families NY, Inc. (FaFNY) I was told, by males and females, that I should change the name as it wasn’t “inclusive”even though the mission statement supported equal rights for both parents and both parents rights free from government interference. Bias towards fathers and fathers rights is what allows them to be removed as a parent and their parental rights.

And we have our share of “man ups” in the FRA/MRA movement. After 3 years of litigation I was arrested, suspended from work, dead broke, with $20 in my pocket and the clothes on my back with a borrowed car and place to sleep. With an OOP over my head based on false allegation and violation of that being a felony I tried to get my access exchange at a neutral location and was denied. Faced with certain felony arrest should I try to get my kids at her residence I stopped picking them up and she refused to deliver them. At the next meeting I was told to “fight harder”. “Don’t give up”, in effect to man up and sacrifice myself. You can see those types of comments all over MRA/FRA social media pages. As if manning up and fighting harder with self sacrifice in a system designed to drain you financially and emotionally will somehow result in a different outcome.

I co-founded the NY Men’s Action Network (originally a PAC) and was a principal lobbyist in Albany for 10 years advocating for parental rights and court reform. There are many politicians who knew how bad the system was and didn’t care to reform it. But the bulk of them were uninformed and my factual stories were dismissed with an “it couldn’t be that bad”, certainly my being male and the lack of empathy for men played a part in limiting reform as the vast majority of negative outcomes in (anti) family court and the system occur to men.

In my 25 years of work with FaFNY I have well over 1000 contact hours with individuals and groups in peer support and counseling. The vast majority of persons I counseled wanted empathy; to be listened to, for their story to be believed, and for recognition that they received a raw deal. While they were the victim of the system by having their individual and parental rights destroyed they were not victims themselves looking for others to correct their problems, they were looking to get others to stop causing their problems. This is much different than the “victim” who blames life’s problems on their race, sex, or life circumstance and looks to others to give them something for free to fix it.

Lack of empathy for men and boys has us ignoring the problems of men and boys. The first act to correct a problem is to recognize what the problem is. A lack of empathy and dismissing the problems prevents us from that first act. And in the multitude of problems facing men and boys; suicide, crime victims, disparate incarceration, denial of parental rights, and on and on there is one underlying facet of each of these problems, a lack of empathy for men and boys.

I disagree with Ms. Fiamingo one one thing, I think every day should be a day of empathy for boys and men. I encourage you to read the article and use it to hone your debate skills in support of men and boys. And if you are looking for more information on boys and men you can go to the Global Initiative for Boys and Men https://www.gibm.us/home, or the National Coalition For Men https://ncfm.org.

James Hays, Lt. (Ret) NYS En-Con Police, past President FaFNY, past Director NY MAN.

STOP blaming men; from A beat dead, disenfranchised dad on fatherless day

Being a beat dead, disenfranchised father for 25 years one would think that I would have hardened and gotten used to the anti male posts, articles, and comments about fathers on Father’s Day. But I haven’t, the negativity and chastisements telling fathers how they are supposed to be and blaming fathers for being absent still pisses me off to no end. I suspect it is from the idiocy and propaganda that family break down is the fault of men and not government policies, laws, rules, and regulation which is the cause. Blame which flies in the face of reality.

The most recent installment of idiocy is the Administration for Children and Families “Dadication” campaign (https://fatherhood.gov/dadication) directed at fathers through its fatherhood.gov web site. Of course government needs to push the “responsible fatherhood” agenda as cover for the fact that the disenfranchisement of fathers and the destruction of families is the result of their own programs. In response to a 20% out of wedlock birth rate in the African American community in the 1960’s the Moynihan Report came out (the Johnson Administration) and received immediate backlash for blaming black men.

Johnson’s war on poverty and the developing nanny/daddy state began subsidizing single mother homes. As these federal programs increased (Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations) so too did the problem of single mother homes. Adding to the out of wedlock fatherless homes was an increasing divorce rate which was made easier by “no fault” divorce laws. Even though more woman initiated divorce then men the stereotype was the philandering husband abandoning his family for the younger trophy wife. Men were blamed for “abandoning” their children regardless of circumstances.

Many people are unaware that the advocacy for men’s rights and fathers rights goes back to the 1970’s. Groups like the Men’s Defense Association published “The Liberator” newspaper advocating for equality for men in divorce and with child custody. The National Coalition of Free Men, renamed the National Coalition For Men at NCFM.org, was formed in 1977 and is still in existence today. (Full disclosure, I was a member of MDA and am a life member of NCFM). Sadly, blaming men for social ills continued with liberals looking at men as oppressors, “the patriarchy”, and conservatives looking at them a “deadbeats” not living up to their responsibilities.

It was under the Reagan administration the blaming men rose to new heights. A PBS special highlighted a black man who bragged of having 9 children with 9 different mothers and this was used to argue for a Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement to set standards for financial responsibility for fathers. “Deadbeat dads” were to be held responsible to pay back into federal coffers money expended to pay for his children. Title IVd of the Social Security Act was amended to award states money to hold these deadbeats responsible and a massive federal and state bureaucracy was born.

Of course the gynocentric hypocrisy was ignored. The fact that there was 9 tawdry mothers who had children out of wedlock with the same man was overlooked as was the fact that women choose to have out of wedlock children, not men who have no say in a woman’s pregnancy or abortion. Child support payments were now separated from father access to his children, no kids no check used to be the rule. Combined with no fault divorce, a man could be divorced from his children against his will and responsible fatherhood was redefined by government and media as did you pay your child support on time and in full.

Dr. Warren Farrell wrote “the Myth of Male Power” in the 1990’s pointing to the gynocentric hypocrisies. Sanford Braver conducted federally funded research in the 1990’s which he published in “Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myth’s” where he debunked the myth of the deadbeat dad. Unfortunately truth was countered by a biased media (see Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias”) and now a large state and federal bureaucracy funded to take money from fathers and transfer it to federal coffers or direct to mothers.

I (with others) formed the Coalition of Fathers and Families Inc. and the NY Men’s Action Network PAC in the 1990’s and like others hoped the new technologies of email, internet, and web sites would help dispel the myth’s of the deadbeat dad and other negative stereotypes of men but unfortunately well funded government agencies and well funded by government non profits use these same tools to better advantage. Misinformed chivalry meets biased gynocentrism supported by propaganda from government and organizations making a living “fixing” the problem. There is no better example then the “Dadication” Campaign, unfortunately which is but one of many.

I was lifted today when I read an op-Ed in the Epoch Times, “On Fatherhood” by Paul Adams (https://www.theepochtimes.com/on-fatherhood_3863038.html). In it he points out the difference in treatment of mothers on Mother’s Day and fathers on Father’s Day with mothers receiving praise and fathers being admonished. We are making some progress. Unfortunately right along side of it is an article about fathers manning up in a feminized world. On the former article I commented on items which needed to be fixed, on the latter I commented on the mistake of blaming men (which pulled me from other chores to write this blog).

We are now entering the 6th decade of government nanny and daddy state regulation of the family. Each succeeding generation we have seen an increase in fatherless households to now 40% of families in America, 75% in the African American community. We continue to blame men, now “soy boys”, “cellar dwellers” or “gang bangers” for being raised absent their father and admonish them to act different while the new “woke” generation blames everything on men (ignoring how good most of us have it in America).

Government regulation of fathers and families has made marriage a hostile environment for men and we wonder why nobody wants to get married and women lament the “lack of marriageable men”. Child support has gotten so draconian that having a child, in or out of marriage, is a hostile environment for men and we wonder why the birth rate has dropped below 2 children per woman, not large enough to sustain our population. We raise children without their biological father then we wonder why they suffer greater anti-social behaviors. As long as we continue to blame men, give women a pass for not being responsible, and ignore the problems of government regulation of the family, we are not going to see any change for the better.

The Daddy State is Replacing Fathers and Undermining Marriage

Not a day goes by where we don’t see a person on TV talking about the problems of father absence and out of wedlock births. Do a search for “Responsible Father” and up pops web sites and government programs directed at men and talking about their responsibility to their children. As a 25 year father rights activist I am well aware of these programs having attended state and national seminars put on by government promoting responsible fathers all aimed at fixing fathers. Unfortunately they are all the same and doomed to failure for they fail to properly identify the problem and keep blaming men and ignoring the federal government and states as the culpable parties.

The 1935 Social Security Act (SSA) included federal dollars for Aid to Dependent Children. At that time most black mothers worked so the program was aimed primarily at white mothers with a deceased, absent, or unable to work husband. In the early 1960s civil rights activists and welfare reform activists worked to eliminate biases within the system and black mother participation increased. Fearing the program would reduce marriages the name was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1962. In 1964 President Johnson began his war on poverty campaign which added food stamps and medicaid for poor people. Thus the role of father as financial provider was usurped.

In 1967 the federal government required states to establish paternity and also to extend benefits of unemployed male parents. In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled that the AFDC benefits could not be reduced for a man in the house if they were not deemed to be an “actual or substitute parent.” In 1981 the Supreme Court ruled that a step-fathers income be considered. Thus providing a financial incentive to mothers to not live with their children’s father and to not marry any future significant others.

In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw that there was a crisis in African American families as 23.6% of births were to unmarried mothers. He also noted that historically the rate of increase or decline in African American male unemployment paralleled the rate of AFCD cases but in 1962 the lines crossed with AFDC cases going up as unemployment claims went down. He warned against Defining Deviancy Down as single mother houses were becoming socially acceptable. When he published his findings in “The Negro Family: the Case for National Action” he received criticism from civil rights leaders for labelling blacks. The report was not put into policy by Johnson due to this.

In 1960 the birth control pill was approved for use in the United States giving women reproductive choice. In 1970 abortion was legalized. Men have no similar effective temporary birth control method nor means to “abort” an unwanted pregnancy. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy she can terminate the pregnancy regardless of the wishes of the man. If a woman decides to carry the pregnancy to term, even if she lied to the man about her reproductive status, and even if he doesn’t want to be a father, she can establish him as the father and he will be held financially responsible for the child.

The Feminist movement began in the 1960s and originally touted itself as an equal rights movement but the radical feminist movement split off from that blaming “patriarchal white men” for “oppression” of women. It portrayed the view that men were abusers of women and children. The theme of the feminist was women don’t need men. Labor participation increased for women throughout the 60’s with 1963s Equal Pay Act and 1965s establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and prohibitions on sex discrimination in employment. While originally about choice, the movement looks down and denigrates women who choose a traditional nuclear family over a career, encouraging young girls to forego the former and choose the latter as the social norm.

Historically the person wanting out of a marriage or who committed adultery lost custody of the children. In the late 1800s the courts increasingly relied on the Tender Years Doctrine holding that young children be placed with the mother and older children with the father. In 1970 California passed the first “no fault” divorce law and this trended across the land. In reality all one needed to do to escape a marriage was to file for legal separation in family court, live apart for a year, then file for divorce under the abandonment statutes. New York was the last state to enact no fault divorce in 2010. Child custody changed in the 1970s abandoning the Tender Years Doctrine in favor of The Best Interests of the Child standard. Thus decision making on custody was placed at the courts discretion. Even with this standard the mother custody rate after divorce was well over 85% due to judicial bias against men. Divorce rates jumped to about 50% of all marriages.

The combination of subsidized single mother homes and easy divorces saw divorces and father absent homes rise as did AFDC claims. In 1988 President Reagan signed the Family Support Act establishing a federal Office of Child Support Enforcement thus removing states rights in this area. He ordered the states to have support guidelines in effect but left the states only one year to establish them. Each State was to also establish an Office of Child Support Enforcement. While labelled as “child support” the massive bureaucratic program was designed to establish paternity of children receiving AFDC and hold the father financially responsible and return the money to federal coffers. And thus the “Deadbeat Dad” was created.

Lacking time to establish reasonable child support guidelines the states just enacted the example guidelines provided by the federal government, an income shares model which taxed the “non custodial parent” (most often the father) 17% of his income for one child and 25% for two (with some variation in states). The assessment is pre tax dollars so the payer is responsible for the income tax in addition to the income transfer and one child is 35% and two 48% of gross income. In later years draconian collection methods were implemented, including incarceration. Fathers making close to 3 figure salaries can usually make the payments and still get by but a father making under $60,000 is reduced to living below poverty levels. Studies have shown that the vast majority of “deadbeats” are really dead broke, inability to pay the number one reason for default. Incarceration disproportionately affects poor fathers who tend towards young fathers and fathers of color.

In the 1990s Sanford Braver conducted the only federal research on child support and the family and he published his findings in “Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myth’s.” This, and subsequent private studies, have shown that about 80% of divorces are filed by women with the number one reason being “we grew apart”. The divorce rate peaked at about 50% of all marriages and has been declining as the marriage rate is rapidly declining. After divorce mothers obtain about 50% of the marital assets, usually more, and gain custody of children in about 85% cases. Worse, there are virtually no access enforcement avenues for a non custodial parent denied access by the custodial parent, and 50% of women admitted to having interfered with a fathers access to his children.

In out-of-wedlock births the support guidelines provide a perverse incentive for women to have multiple children with multiple fathers as two 17% payers (34%) is higher than one father paying for two (25%). Poor young men have no disincentive to having out-of-wedlock children as they have no income to be taxed. And those with out-of-wedlock children are incentivized to work off the books, crime and drug distribution two good off the books income earners. Access to their children can be had by providing direct financial support to the mother in exchange for access. And we are now in the third and forth generations of children raised in single mother homes, thus establishing it as the societal norm for 1/2 the population.

As government “helped” the family these past 6 decades we saw marriage decline, divorce and out -of-wedlock births increase and now 40% of children live absent their father, close to 75% of African American fathers. I think it’s plain to see, it isn’t fathers that need to be taught responsibility.

James Hays, Lt. (Ret) NY En-Con Police, past President of the Coalition of Fathers and Families NY, Inc. (FaFNY) and past Director of the NY Men’s Action Network (NYMAN).

The answer is you, the time is now

Organizational infighting, no organizational cooperation towards a specific goal, and a lack of individual support are killing the men’s rights/fathers rights/parental rights movement. Now that I have 25 years of activism under my belt with a multitude of organizations (many of which have come and gone) I can offer up my personal experience as an example of individuals not supporting the cause and worse, individuals undermining the cause.

It’s 1995 and I got whacked with the standard triple order, a “Temporary Order of Protection (TOP) restricting access to my children, a “Temporary” Custody Order for my (soon to be) ex wife, and the “Temporary” Child Support Order. Sound familiar? This when the internet hadn’t yet been invented and email was a new thing which most didn’t have. I found a newspaper notice of a meeting for the “Fathers Rights Association NYS” (FRANYS) and attended my first meeting of the local Capital District chapter (FRA-CD).

The first meeting was attended by the President of the local chapter and me. That’s it. I did get a load of good information from him to help me individually as a pro se litigant. Subsequent meetings would have at most 3 or 4 people and for the most part consisted of people relaying their personal injustices suffered, each story worse than the one before. The statewide meeting was to be in our area in a couple of month’s and I attended that, about 10 people at that one. I sat down and when attendance was taken of the chapter delegates voting on the state board there was none from my chapter so I was sat as the voting member. I’m 4 months into the process and sitting on a policy board.

The organization, a 501c3 non profit, lacked any consistent lobbying of government for change and had NO political action committee or lobbyist. The monthly meetings consisted of people looking for help on their individual cases and upon hearing the system was so bad that they would end up with the “Standard NY Order” of every other weekend visits which weren’t enforced and payment of excessive child support which would leave them personally at the poverty level most attended 2 or 3 meetings and never joined to organization as a member. But every month a group of new initiates to injustice would show up looking for help.

The organization held a lobby day at the NYS Legislature each spring and I attended my first in 1996. Attendance was less than 50 people, this in a state with a population of about 20 million where it is estimated there were 2.5 million plus non custodial parents. It was disorganized with few meetings between organization leaders and the leaders of the legislature and important committees. Many attendees showed up in shorts and t-shirts and it was not uncommon for a meeting with a legislator to turn into an insult fest with legislators shouted at for what they haven’t done to help out. Once the event was over there was no lobbying presence and outside of this legislative activity there was no interaction with state agencies or the executive and judicial branches of government.

After 3 years of litigation I lost my kids to alienation in 1999. Instead of dealing with individual injustices I decided to get involved to change things for the better for everybody. I was elected President of FRA-CD and also made the Chair of the Legislative Committee with FRANYS. I had weekly meetings with legislative leaders and began lobbying the Governors Office and the Office of Court Administration which oversees NYS Courts. I was joined by FRA-CD members Debby Fellows and Randall L. Dickinson and we 3 became the principle advocates and lobbyists in NYS.

In 2001 we lobbied the NYS Senate Leader for money for a fatherhood center and were to receive a grant of $25,000 the first year. But some in the state leadership feared that FRA-CD, the largest chapter of 6, would break from it so they “decertified” the FRA-CD leadership. They then filed felony theft charges against me for paying the chapters outstanding bills “without authorization”. The frivolous charges were dismissed at grand jury, but not without 6 month’s under the color of charges which resulted in the Senate pulling support for the Fatherhood Center.

The removal of FRD-CD did result in the chapter going independent and the Coalition of Fathers and Families NY, Inc. (FaFNY) was formed as a statewide membership organization from the leaders of the FRA-CD Chapter. FRANYS and its chapters ceased activity except for local in person meetings and folded all together a few years later. We chose to call ourselves a coalition as our focus was going to be on educating and lobbying NYS Government in all branches and at all levels and in doing so would bring together the various organizations in NYS to work on goals and objectives such as shared parenting and court reform.

We held a statewide lobby day in April of every year to bring in the groups to lobby for our legislation. In addition we held weekly meetings with legislators, staff, the Governors Office and NYS Court Administration. I delivered flyers and handouts to the entire legislature EVERY week, walking the floors and delivering them personally. We wrote op-ed articles and appeared on TV and Radio. But to maintain this level of work we were expending 30-40 hours a week, this on top of our full time jobs. Maintaining membership lists got to be an administrative burden and we changed to a Board run organization which freed up more time to lobby. We affiliated nationally with the American Coalition of Fathers and Children (ACFC). We held many successful protests with media coverage and were successful in changing many policies and rules for the better and we blocked a lot of anti-father legislation.

In 2006 we started a push to get shared parenting enacted. The powers opposed managed to hold the bill in the Children and Families Committee of the Assembly and we focused our attention there. Through affiliation with ACFC we used Glenn Sacks “His side” computer-fax and developed a “Thumbs Up!” campaign to bombard members of the committee daily and continually to bring the bill up for a vote this in addition to collecting signatures across the state. Month’s of work culminated in a scheduled vote but opposition by Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver resulted in him horse trading favors for no votes and a slim majority of both parties together held the bill, in effect killing it that year.

The work load took a toll on those with the organization and combined with changing life circumstances the leaders took a needed break from organizing and lobbying. Unfortunately no persons or organizations have stepped up to fill the void in lobbying state government. The National Parents Organization is pushing for Bill A0918 in the NYS Assembly a shared parenting in temporary orders bill and a quick search shows Shared Parenting S02916 Helming, and S04260 Parker in the Senate. A04005 Weprin, same as S02584 Lanza which is the Family Court Reform Act (a FaFNY sponsored bill) is still in both houses. All bills sit with few multi or co-sponsors showing a lack of lobbying for enactment.

I think my experience supports my position of a lack of support and organizational cooperation. I don’t want to sound all gloom and doom though. Given that organizations are staffed almost 100% by unpaid volunteers and we represent a group of people who have been financially wiped out, and usually remain so for many years, the advocacy organizations have made great headway. In 1995 you would have been given every other weekend Friday at 5 to Sunday at 6 and one mid week 4 hour visit with NO enforcement for interfering with that little time and it was unheard of for a father to actually get custody. Child Support Enforcement and courts treated you like the enemy, now not so much. So things have improved, but there’s much more to do.

Just as emails and internet changed our organization from meeting in a physical location once a month, social media and high speed internet are changing the way groups “meet” and discuss things. Information which took us month’s to find or distribute now can be disbursed in minutes with the worlds information available immediately on your smart phone. That said, it is a bit shameful that in this day and age of instant communication we have no organizational cooperation towards a specific goal, no individual participation in action items like contacting legislators, and legislation like shared parenting which has about 85% support of the population sits idle with no organizational or grass roots advocacy.

If you agree the system needs changing the person to do that is you and the time to do it is now.

James Hays, (Ret) NYS En-Con Police Lt., Co-founder and past President FaFNY, past Director NY MAN, life member NCFM, past administrator with Friends of Protection For Men.

Do you know how many complaints we have?

When I took over as principle lobbyist for FaFNY in the 1990’s (in addition to co-founding, being president of, and running the legislative committee and Director of NYMAN PAC) I scheduled face to face meetings with policy advisors in the Governors Office, the Chief Administrative Judge for the NYS Courts Matrimonial Part (which includes family court). the Commissioner of NYS Child Support, and the NYS Bar Association. I would make an agenda of 10 items of complaint that I had culled from the many complaints of members of this and other organizations. The question I dreaded most from the person I was meeting with was, “Do you know how many formal complaints I have on file with us”? Because I knew what the answer would be; zero, nada, NONE.

In the days before the internet meetings were held monthly, face to face, at a public meeting hall. We started calling them “pity parties” for they consisted of persons complaining of the injustices and looking for help in their individual case. While the venting of the emotional impact of the system was an important part of the meetings there was no drive to work to change the system. Even when we started doing targeted letter writings we would get push back with people stating it was no use and it was a waste of time. Most were unconcerned with change other than their own individual case.

As an organizational leader I would also get rank and file advice on what I should be doing. Worse, many would try to lecture me on being ineffective as I didn’t (insert complaint here) bring out awareness, put hundred of people in the street protesting, made us look bad by fighting against child support injustices, didn’t get enough press, fought for fathers only showing gender bias, didn’t provide free resources, yada, Yada, YADA.

When this Wuhan Virus crisis hit I wrote a letter to the federal office of child support enforcement, the state child support enforcement office, and the NYS Courts. I posted it on NYMAN and on multiple Facebook pages. I HAVE SEEN ZERO POSTINGS OF LETTERS TO ANY GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL REGARDING PROBLEMS IN THIS SYSTEM from any other state or by another organization in NYS. Over a week I get less than 10 hits a day on this post on NYMAN and I have seen ZERO posts regarding someone who forwarded it as a link to it to a government official. The question I have for you is WHY? Is the system working for you or are you so busy sheltering in place at home and out of work that you can’t send an email or a letter outlining your complaints?

Is the family rights/fathers rights/men’s rights movement a wheel so broken it doesn’t even squeak anymore? Will a wheel that doesn’t squeak get any grease? I have seen one article discussing the family court backlog and Covid-19, and I posted a link to that article on multiple facebook pages requesting people go to that site and comment there to bring awareness of the complaints to the public eye. My comment (and an advertising comment) stands alone. WHY?

For those of you who are just entering this system of injustice I’m sure it is scary to hear that it used to be far worse. From the 1990’s to the present there have been a scant few dedicated people, with limited resources, who work day in and day out to foster change. It has been occurring slowly over time. And it will continue to change IF people continue to do something to foster change. The answer to who should do it is YOU and the answer to what to do is ANYTHING which puts it on the public record. Many hands lighten the load.

If you look for personal help and then fail to foster change then you are part of the problem. If you fail to file formal complaints regarding the injustices you have suffered, then you are part of the problem. When an organization asks you to provide assistance (a letter or an email for them to use) and you don’t, then you are part of the problem. If you fail to comment on the original content from news sites, then you are part of the problem. And if you have an idea that an organization should do and you don’t volunteer to do it, then you are part of the problem. If you are whining at a pity party without proposing a solution to the problem, then YOU are the problem.

So what do you plan to do and when do you plan to do it?

The time to do something is now, the person to do it is you.

You can be a part of the solution, just make it happen.

James Hays, Lt. NYS En-Con Police (Ret) was a 25 year family rights advocate (Ret). He co-founded the Coalition of Fathers and Families NY, Inc. (FaFNY) and served as President, Treasurer, and Legislative Committee Chair. He co-founded and was Treasurer of the NY Men’s Action Network (NYMAN) PAC and was a lobbyist for Family Rights from 1996 to 2006. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Family and Society from SUNY. He continues to contribute to the NY Men’s Action Network blog in his retirement.