Deadbeat Dads

Two words: "deadbeat dad." You hear them all the time, those of you back home in Canada, don't you? Any man who is not paying court-appointed child support is a "deadbeat dad," isn't he?


Great phrase--the lovely assonance makes it easy to remember, and summon up on any appropriate occasion. Whoever came up with it knew what they were doing. Perhaps they worked for the Ministry of Truth. It is capable of reducing any divorced father --any-- from a human being to a cartoon villain with just two words, and in a fraction of a second. Case dismissed.

It is vital to realize this, because it is how all prejudice works. Calling someone a "deadbeat dad" is just the same in principle and in moral terms as calling them a "lazy nigger" or a "greedy Jew" -- or, to cite another example, a "pedophile." It is a trick to dehumanize people, after which you can do to them whatever you want.

Understand now that it would work in a courtroom just as it probably did with you, gentle reader. Since the prejudice is everywhere and socially acceptable--indeed, socially obligatory--just as the prejudice "greedy Jew" was in Nazi Germany, or "lazy nigger" in the postbellum US South, no Dad in the dock for child support can expect any understanding of his circumstances. The judge will, just as you just did, dismiss all evidence and testimony with a sweep of the cuff, think only of the prejudicial stereotype "deadbeat dad," and refuse to believe he cannot pay, or that he is not paying for any reason but lack of responsibility. He will, indeed, probably need to be punished pre-emptively.

It's just the way men are, right?
Which is why the fact is almost always the opposite--just as most Jews gassed in Nazi Germany were not really guilty of doing anything wrong, and most black men lynched in the US South weren't.
Most will go on, if recent personal correspondence from Canada is any indication, having stripped the man of any human characteristics, to blame _him_ for being separated from his children. Assuming that any Dad does not want to see or have anything to do with his children is like charging the nigger with the cost of the rope you use to hang him, and making him tie the knot. It is rarely the husband who chooses divorce, in the first place; it is usually the wife. It is most certainly rarely the father who decides he is not to have custody of the children, or not even to have visitation rights.
There is, in addition, a fundamental and outrageous inequity in the assumption that the right to actually live with the children and watch them grow up, and the duty to pay the bills, without seeing receipts, are morally equivalent. If it really were so, then slaves on the US South genuinely owed their labour to their masters, didn't they? It was a perfectly fair and just arrangement. What's all this fuss about slavery?
In Canada, one dare not even say such things. But so long as you go along with it, and benefit from it, as you do daily if you are a woman, you are also guilty of it.
There are, of course, fathers who are irresponsible, just as there are mothers who are irresponsible, and just as there are Jews who really are greedy. Of course. This does not justify the prejudice.

As a result, in places like the Philippines, where I am right now, or Thailand, or Vietnam, there might as well be a statue in every entry harbour, with an inscription about bringing those huddled masses of ex-husbands yearning to be free.

There are a lot of expats here. They are all men. And their stories are almost always the same story.

Thank Lady Liberty there is still, at least, a place for men to flee. Even if most of them arrive here with nothing more than the small change in their pockets.
 
This may be, as a result, the place where the future is built, as such places have been before.