Kos made a provocative one-line comment about the death of Steve Irwin, R.I.P. While some have called for Kos to apologize or retract his comments, some with rather eloquent language, I would respectfully make the alternative case for Kos standing his ground.
As fathers, we find a society that is not too conducive to valuing us. The best work that fathers can do - raising their sons and, to a slightly lesser extent, their daughteers to be upright, decent and honorable people - is the most crucial work that can be done. It is the height of honor to be a father, and a great joy also.
The first thing that a father must avoid being is absent. Much of the culture provides a temptation to be absent. Making more money means "you win" - overtime, making partner, getting the promotion - but your children may well lose. If your "friends" are superficial, they will not pat you on the back for the car you did not buy because of the money you did not have because of the non-billable time you spent with your children. That's usually not a problem, however, because you don't usually have to get rid of false superficial friends when you become a father; they tend to leave, which is convenient. There are many ways to be absent - at work, at the golf course, in a hobby, with a mistress, in a bottle, there are many others.
You have to be present to have an influence, in fatherhood or anything else. Much of the problem with America's underclass - regardless of ethnicity - is that fathers are gone - dead, strung out, ducking child support, in jail, ducking a warrant or otherwise "non sunt." It is rare to see a Dad pull junior out of a juvenile detention center; if Dad's available at all, junior rarely gets into that sort of trouble. Ditto absent fathers of girls and boys alike and teen pregnancies, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, dropping out. Whether Dad is an old-school hardass or a more moderate, modern Dad, if he is present, clean and sober, the Department of Social Services is unlikely to know his family well.
As fathers, we must sacrifice (G-d knows mothers must.) I would love to reduce my daily commute to below 120 minutes each way. But that would mean either taking a lower-pay job in Baltimore where salaries are simply too low to allow my wife to continue to stay home with our kids, or moving out of Baltimore County to another jurisdiction closer to DC, but in so doing we would uproot my 3 year old son from the autism-specific special ed classes that Baltimore County provide so well, not to mention doubling our mortgage in the crack-head real estate market south of the Patapsco River. So I have a 240 minute round-trip commute. I could stay later and earn BIG money on overtime in Cash City, but that would mean my family would not see me at all. So it's car to MARC commuter rail to DC metro for me, then work 9 hours, then reverse.
Why? Because I am the only person in the world who can do this task. I am the only father in the universe for Sam and his 1 year old brother Noah, who can enable them to have full-time with their mother, whose ASL skills are higher than mine so she can communicate bilingually with Sam to aid his development. I come home tired and late, and it means that I try to have contact with my fellows in the morning and on the weekends. It means that when I want to sleep in on Saturday morning, tough. No weekend hobbies outside the house during daylight for a few years, not a lot of museums or movies either. Why? Because babysitters for autistic kids are very rare, 99.9 percent of fatherhood is showing up when possible, and 99.9 percent of being a husband means treating your wife like she's a human being, so she doesn't get jailed here with two kids all damn week.
It means that my exceptionally tough and smart wife is building a business that will eventually, if all goes well, enable me to be a stay-at-home Dad. American culture - i.e. a consumer culture's echo chamber - will tell me that I am a loser for doing that when we do that in the future. After all, a real man earns a big check outside the house, especially an Ivy League educated DC lawyer, right? No. A real father does what needs to be done, in this case being home as his wife's company's "Vice President" to maximize contact with Sam to further his verbal and other development. That's also why I blog: it is a hobby/business that can be done by a future stay-at-home dad while all others are asleep. But compared to my friends who have six girls and a newborn baby boy, not just two in diapers, we have no child care responsibilities at all.
Point being: real men and real fathers are not defined by earning big money, consuming like decadent Romans and screwing the female half of the Zip Code, nor by the pinnacles of professional or financial achievement; real men and real fathers do what needs to be done for the children, and task one is showing up. Real men throw out the macho tough guy bullshit and protect #1 - the kids. It means if taking care of your family means you have to drive a bus, you drive a bus, shovel shit, crack coal. Same rule applies in Australia, even if your mates call you a sheila for doing so.
A major part of the rise of the Christian conservative movement in the U.S. is that they are unapologetically pro-father, period, 100% of the time. While I do not share their patriarchal family model values or religious teachings, they are dead-on about Dad being vital. In some evangelical churches, if a father is failing his children or his wife, the men of the church will go support him, support including a swift kick in the ass or, as needed, putting out an APB for him to get a new job, a used car to get to work, some alcohol rehab or what have you. Would that liberals and secular people like me were so solid all the time. But you don't have to buy Christian theology or patriarchal politics to buy into the notion that fatherhood - being there for the children - is vital, the Prime Directive.
Perhaps Irwin's kids in the Land of Oz may not have faced all of the challenges of a sick American society, even if Irwin had been of more modest means. But Irwin had a fundamental paternal duty not to the goddamn stingray that killed him, but to his children who have survived, who instead of a father now have a funeral and a collection of crocodile videos to provide them guidance. He was shooting a video on lethal marine wildlife; this was not a needlepoint video gone horribly, horribly wrong or a horrible mishap on a gourmet show with a champagne cork. He could have chosen some other person with a higher risk tolerance to conduct this aspect of the shooting. We will never know for sure. Irwin himself made statements in his life to the effect that if an animal hurts him, it's his fault and not the animal's. We should respect Irwin by acknowledging his acceptance of such responsibility for his actions.
Some have said that stingrays are safe, citing a small number of recorded killings. Yet one just killed a master of animal husbandry while he was shooting a video entitled "Ocean's Deadliest." Australia is not densely populated like New Jersey; there are not many people even living in the region where Irwin died, let alone swimming with the stingrays. I am not a marine biologist, but the only phrase that comes to mind is quod erat demonstrandum - he proved his case about the Ocean's Deadliest through his own sad death. One may also ask whether he engaged in conduct with the stingray similar to what he did with the crocodile while holding his infant in 2004. Perhaps the stingray was safe, and only Irwin's methods were dangerous. In fairness, this is in part a factual question beyond my skill level, but it strengthens, not weakens, Kos' case for being bewildered.
Had Irwin simply no other opportunity to feed his children, I could understand it; my grandfather fell off a scaffold while laying brick and died before I was born. Those men who sacrifice their lives for the greater good of humanity (sorry, PETA) or their neighbors are heroes. Had Irwin died to save someone from a fire or a bomb or served honorably in the military or piloted a medivac copter we would speak of an honorable man fallen in service, perhaps a hero, certainly worthy or respect. Kos himself is a veteran and he understands that sort of sacrifice far better than do I, as a non-veteran in whom the U.S. Army lost interest at my age 20 when a recruiter learned of my asthma as a teenager. But when Kos states that he cannot understand the reasoning of someone who risks not just his life but risks failing his children through his absence for a questionable purpose, I agree.
I hope that Kos stands his ground firmly, one father to another. But our possible bewilderment at Irwin's conduct should not lead us to forget that a man of good will died suddenly and young, and that is a tragedy.