August 2022: Join The ConVersation
Let the Conversation begin
To all who attended our first film screening at the Look Dine-In Theater on July 27th, of the human trafficking film Angie: Lost Girls, thank you for making that evening such a success. That event kicked off a series of film / panel discussion of topics to raise awareness, an alarm, and highlight the difference we can make as we prioritize keeping children and our communities safe from human trafficking and being better engaged dads and parents.
Ten years ago my mom was trying to renew her driver’s license at 88, after she gently collided with cars, garage doors, walls…My brothers and sisters tried to encourage her to abandon that effort. This was after an 86 year old man had floored his car into the crowd at the Santa Monica farmers market killing 9 and putting 50 others in the hospital, requiring him to spend the remainder of his life under house arrest and having left a multigenarational wake of nightmares and grief. I told her, what a shame it would be to accidentally kill someone at the end of your life.
The last couple of weeks have seen 37 year old Houston nurse Nicole Lorraine Linton slam into 6 cars at 90 miles per hour killing 6 people including an infant, unborn child and mother, and this after 13 previous accidents. And just this last week, the fiery collision of Anne Heche’s Mercedes with a house leaving one injured and herself existing on life support until being taken off 9 days later. Reportedly drugs and alcohol may have played a role. I may be grasping here, but I am left with a profound sense of sorrow at the quantity and quality of suffering that will ripple forward from these, and many other consequences of choices, to drink, speed, basically not consider others when those choices were made. Regret is the shadow of responsibility, and though I hear people declare they have no regrets, I for one have many. Choices I have made as a man, husband, father, left scars. I cannot control how others will be affected by my choices, but living with the humbling awareness that my choices will inevitably impact others has served me to strive to make the best choices I can. It also inspires me in my work with men and fathers in the prevention of human trafficking. If we can get it, really get it, that we have, whether we like it or not, responsibility that is ours and ours alone, we may just find ourselves celebrating more than regreting. We can try to abdicate, dash for the hills, or submit to a warlord with the slimy armor of “following orders” to protect ourselves from this truth, but it remains all the same. In a family, how I love, live, relate to those around me will impact my children, and ripple outward.
When we see responsibility as the enemy of liberty, not its enabler, we fail to see the blessing it is. If I can impact others negatively by my choices to speed, drink, indulge in porn or pay for a 12 year old when desire overwhelms, I can also have a massive positive impact when I choose to listen, control my desires to be trustworthy, take my daughter on a date, or be thankful of my wife. When we prioritize prevention of the consequences of fumbling, we take every opportunity to develop our skills at hanging on to the ball! And when we know we have others who support and not condemn us when we stumble, we rise all the faster. Be there, not as a locker room buddy, but a friend. A friend, a brother, a father living with “radical kinship” as Fr. Gregory Boyle describes it.
Patrick Erlandson, Founder: Father-Con, and See it. End it. Film & Arts Festival