When I think of my father, I think of a dynamic, tyrannical consistency. He cut his children off at every pass, and his message was terrifying: “I am bigger than you, stronger than you and smarter than you. I will win.” We felt a constant pressure, a pervading sense that ending up as a nothing corner-boy was not an option. We lived by a kind of Bushido that simply held: Be somebody or die.

So much has changed since those days. The streets are, as they always were, marked by peril. But the murder rate has fallen, and Magic Johnson is still alive. And yet in the homes of so many black children, the father remains invisible. I don’t want to slip into the lazy mythology of Ward Cleaver and the vanishing nuclear family. What’s done is done, and as we move forward, families will no longer be what they were. So many fathers — unable to be breadwinners, frustrated with the mothers of their children — simply check out. But in these times, we must remember the core of fatherhood: that it is nasty work, that it is the dark art of manipulating children into striving for their higher selves, and that it will be many years before the children themselves see that this was best.

I am: White Hispanic-American (grew up in NYC’s Spanish Harlem), male, 48, tend to vote Republican (I reserve the right to say that I’ll be glad to see Dubya vacate the White House), a right-leaning moderate, and a Christian who believes in lifting people up rather than putting them down. I am an engineer. I have not studied philosophy, but I do demand that arguments be rational.