Video Commentary (5min 58sec): Best Part of Barack Obama's Father's Day Speech not Covered in the News. "Obama's Father's Day speech, it was given at Apostolic Church of God on Chicago's South Side. There was a heavy dose of religion. There was a heavy dose of responsibility. He addressed it somewhat to the black community but that is being over-hyped a little bit. It was broader than that. It was to all fathers, in a sense and how we should be in society. So I want to read you a couple of paragraphs from the speech we couldn't find anywhere else and let you judge how good it was. OK?
"Sometimes I go to an eighth grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers and I think to myself, 'It's just eighth grade.' To really compete, they need to graduate high school and they need to graduate college and they probably need a graduate degree too. An eighth grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library. It's up to us as fathers and parents to instill this ethic of excellence in our children.
It’s up to us to say to our daughters, don’t ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It’s up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we live glory to achievement, self respect, and hard work. It’s up to us to set these high expectations. And that means meeting those expectations ourselves. That means setting examples of excellence in our own lives.
The second thing we need to do as fathers is pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in 'us' that we forget about our obligations to one another. There's a culture in our society and says remembering those obligations is somehow soft. That we can't show weakness, so therefore we can't show kindness. But our young boys and girls see that. They see that when you are somehow ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see that when you are inconsiderate at home. Or when you are distant. Or when you are thinking only of yourself. So, it's no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools and on our streets. That's why we pass on the values of empathy and and kindness to our children by living them.
"We need to show our kids you're not strong by putting other people down. You're strong by lifting them up. That's our responsibility as fathers...."
