Cincinnatus Smith

For Father's Day The Seed That Alfred’s Fathers Planted by E.M. Burlingame Fathers. And you who would be fathers. On this day I bring you no new words. What I must say to every man who still feels the old fire in his chest, I would have said yesterday and will say again tomorrow. But upon this field of battle forming before us, I will speak it plainly now. Go back with me before Runnymede, before any charter or parliament, before the long road that led to rights written on parchment. Go back to the time when the English peoples were scattered kingdoms and the sea itself poured forth an endless tide of Northmen who came to burn the monasteries, slaughter families, and erase the memory of who we were. In those days a father named Egbert rose in Wessex and gathered what could still be gathered. His son Æthelwulf fought the invaders year after bloody year, holding ground with everything he had while kingdoms around him collapsed into ash and silence. And Æthelwulf’s son—the one we call Alfred—learned from his father and his father’s father what it means to refuse the end. He did not fight only for victory. He fought so that something would remain: the learning, the law, the tongue, the code that made his people a people and not merely another tribe ground under foreign boots. When all seemed lost he went into the marshes, gathered the broken remnants, and struck back—not for glory, but so the seed would live for those who came after. That is the beginning. Not conquest. Not empire. A father’s stubborn, bloody decision that the inheritance would not die on his watch. And from that day to this, it has been fathers who carried that seed forward. Fathers who built. Fathers who sustained. Fathers who shed their own blood and, when necessity demanded, the blood of others, so that the line would hold. Honor them now. All of them, yours and his and his, all the way back. Honor the fathers who stood shield to shield in the shieldwall, who swung the axe at Hastings and lost, yet bent the Norman storm to the old ways and made the conqueror speak their law. Honor the fathers who fought through the Wars of the Roses, English blood on English steel, a family quarrel that tore the land apart and yet birthed a stronger order. Honor the fathers of the Civil War who, in a foreign fueled and funded bloody brothers war, nearly ended what their fathers had wrought. Honor the fathers who crossed the gray Atlantic with nothing but that seed and their own two hands and planted it in new soil, where the Common Man, great and small alike, became the living foundation of nations. Honor the fathers who bled on a hundred fields from the Somme to the Ardennes, who stormed the beaches of Normandy, who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, who held the line at Kapyong and Khe Sanh. Honor the fathers of the long Cold War, who stood the watch through decades of shadow and proxy, in Berlin and Korea and a thousand places that never made the history books. Honor the fathers of the Global War on Terror, who put on the armor again after the towers fell and fought in the dust of Fallujah, the valleys of Kunar, the streets of Sadr City, who came home in flag-draped coffins or with invisible wounds, and whose sons now wear the same uniform. And honor, too, the fathers fighting today’s near-invisible wars—the men of law enforcement who walk the thin line in our own streets, who wear the badge while their families pray they come home, who face an enemy that does not mass on a border but hides in plain sight, organized crime and those radicalized by ideologies that hate everything we are. Honor the men of counterinsurgency and intelligence, the fathers who cannot tell their children where they go or what they do, who fight the quiet, grinding war against those who would hollow us out from within. These are not separate struggles. They are one war, stretching back to Alfred’s marshes, and the men who wage it have always been fathers, or the sons of fathers who taught them what it costs to be a man. That seed grew into the civilization we call the Anglosphere—the fullest expression yet of the idea that responsible men can order their own lives under a law that even the highest must respect, that a father can earn his place by his own hands and hand something better to his sons and daughters, that the door stays open to any who will carry their share without demanding the house be burned down first. Now the seed is in our hands. And the threat we face is unlike any our fathers or their fathers ever faced back to the beginning. The old threats came from outside—longships on the horizon, armies on the march, empires that wanted our land or our submission or our extinction. Our fathers could see them coming. Could meet them with steel and with the knowledge that their backs were to their own hearths. The threat today lives here at home, and it moves at every level at once. Some of it is overt: laws and policies and institutions that weaken the family, that teach children to despise the fathers who built the roof over their heads, that open borders so wide that those who enter no longer come to join what we are but to replace it. Some of it is clandestine and covert—the quiet, patient work of foreigners and of men among us who have been bought or turned, or who were born wrong, guiding the rot from inside, shaping what is taught in schools, what is enforced in courts, what is celebrated in public and what is shamed into silence. They work in the family where fathers are told they are optional or dangerous. They work in the smallest communities where local voices are drowned by distant money and distant rules. They work in the nations where the machinery of government has been captured by people who no longer believe in the civilization they administer. They work across the entire Anglosphere, the same patterns repeating coordinated by hands that hate what we were, are, and what we still could be. This is the greatest fight for survival our civilization has ever known. Not because the enemy is braver or stronger in arms. Because the enemy has learned to make us doubt whether the seed our fathers and their fathers planted is itself worth the watering. Because the attack is aimed first at the fathers who transmit it from one generation to the next, then at the communities that sustain it in daily life, then at the nations that are supposed to protect it, then at the whole Anglosphere that has been its greatest flowering. If the fathers grow quiet, if the men who would be fathers turn away because the cost in reputation or comfort or safety has grown too high, the seed dies here. Not on some distant battlefield. In our own houses. In our own streets. In the schools our taxes still pay for. In the laws our votes still shape—if we still remember how to vote as men who know what they are defending. I am one father among you. I have carried some of this weight in places where the cost was counted in lives and in places where it is counted in the daily choice to speak when silence would be easier. The seed does not care about our comfort. It only cares whether we pass it forward with our grip still firm and our eyes still clear. So hear me, fathers. On this Father’s Day, the call is older than any of us. Feel what Alfred felt when the kingdoms around him had fallen and the marshes were the last ground left. Feel what every father since has felt when he looked at his children and understood that what he fought to hand them would decide whether the line lived or broke. The love that is not gentle. The love that would rather be broken itself than break faith with the dead fathers who held it and the unborn future fathers who will need it. Then take your place. The line is not somewhere else. It is here. It is now. It runs through your house, your street, your town, your nation, and across every people who natively speak our tongue and carry our memory. The threats are real. The hands guiding them from outside and from within are real. The rot they have already caused is real. But so is the seed fathers have carried and watered in blood across more than a thousand years. So is the fire that has never gone out since Alfred’s fathers first refused to let it die. So too is the love of fathers, that thing so reviled and brought near to utter ruin, burning yet ever bright. Hold it. Hold it for the fathers who came before, whose names you may not know but whose blood runs in your veins. Hold it for the fathers who stand beside you now, on the street, in the precinct, on the wire. Hold it for the sons who are watching you and will become fathers only if you show them how. The fathers who planted it in the beginning did not have it easier than we do. They had it equal parts hard. They bled. They wept. They buried their own fathers and sons. And they did not yield. Neither will we. Not on this Father’s Day. Nor on any day. For all days are the days of fathers.

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