"Wake
Up American Dads"
by Matt O'Connor
Dear all,
It has been three years and thousands of pounds later since we first tried to
get a campaigning branch of F4J in the US off the ground by doing high-profile
protests.
Last year it took to brave Brits,
Jolly Stanesby and Mike Downes to blaze the way at the Lincoln Memorial.
People have been doing bike rides etc and making brave sacrifices.
And who followed in F4J? Nobody.
Yesterday protestors took to the
Golden Gate Bridge in an action designed to highlight the plight of the people
of Tibet. This was something long discussed by me with the apparatchiks in
what quickly became the bastardised US version of F4J. What did we do? Nothing.
Where F4J in the UK, Canada and
Holland were men and women of action, in the US the mission was perverted to
become some impotent, sterilised charity vehicle. Only we didn’t need charity.
We needed action to raise
awareness.
Either through fear or cowardice,
people took the idea of F4J, and pirated and disfigured it because F4J is more
than a name or badge, it is an idea carried by the very people who created it,
understand it and believe in it.
Taking a badge from a campaign
Ferrari and sticking it on a charity milk float ain’t gonna make the milk
float go any faster.
I’m not going to apportion blame
as it’s now all on record, however even last year the bitching and back biting
from a tiny handful continued and went on and on and on and on...
If I didn’t know better, I’d
have thought that the FBI were trying to run us into the ground before we had
even taken off.
Whoever is left running F4J in
the US should resign immediately if not through shame that they have failed to
deliver in raising awareness in this election year, but that they recognise
they are not cut out for the job. Where people looked to F4J for hope, they
have delivered hopelessness.
They should do so before they
inflict any further damage on the movement and deepen the stain left on the
F4J name in the US.
As for the future, we can and
will prevail, but we need brave men and women to step forward. There exists in
the US a rich and talented intellectual base – Dr Stephen Baskerville, Dr
Warren Farrell, Tom Golden, the inimitable Glenn Sacks...hugely capable men I
have learnt from and been humbled by.
But we need a campaigning mirror
to these pioneers. We can still do this, we can still prevail but we need new,
dynamic blood to enter the body politic of the fathers movement in the US.
And I am confident that we will
do this because as one of those people who did more to kill the F4J baby at
birth in the US than anyone said, ‘Matt & F4J could fall off a skyscraper and
still land on their feet’. I hope that despite these challenges, we can land
on our feet in 2008 for the sake of all families, fathers and their children.
If
you are interested in getting involved, please don’t hesitate contacting my
campaign team through this email address:
office@fathers-4-justice.org
Matt
O’Connor
Founder, Fathers 4 Justice
www.fathers-4-justice.org
www.voteenglish.org