High Dawg,
I was very touched by your letter.
It grieves me more over the years to read letters like this than any other type. Maybe because I am a man, and I know how much a good father means to me. I am lucky enough to have a father like the one you wish you had. This week he will be 84 and is still in relatively good health, along with my mother.
Because of my strong family and the love of my father for people, we often took in some of my buds who were temporarily hard up while I was growing up. They would be the lost a homeless and the down and out, but because they were my buds, my dad saw the need and he took them in. We always had plenty of friends around, young and old alike.
Even with having a good father I have my own issues. My father is a hard act to follow. He was raised in the Depression in Oklahoma, and his father owned three grocery stores. My father Ken worked in the stores more like a bouncer than anything. He was the best in hunting and fishing, sales and people skills more than anyone I knew. He is still very social, although his audience is much smaller and consists of my mother and my sister and brother-in-law, niece and nephew and a dozen animals. So he still has a kingdom. :-)) But the gift he gave me was FREEDOM. The freedom to choose various ways to disappoint him.
I'm sure I disappointed my dad. Yet I think more often than not he kept that a secret. He was successful, but his success was based on working with people. Many years later, I guess mine is, too.
Dawg, I wonder how much of this "father mentality" they get it is really personal and not as religious as we think it is? Family members are known to hold grudges much longer than with strangers. We expect a lot of others we love. We hold it against them when they do not fit what we want them to be. All of this develops into resentment and anger. The pain of rejection is so strong that we will cover it over with what ever religious smokescreen we can find. Yet I suspect that not only are the perpetrators of this shunning the losers, but that they are also suffering the most pain. I think sometimes it is so strong that it requires an internal "operation," like an incision, to take out the offending pain and cover it with religious nonsense.
I've seen letters like this continually for the last 27 years. God, how long will they STRIP men from what I believe to be the most influential and powerful bond available to man - father and son? That's rape in my book people.
I think I see this more than anything else in the organization including mental illness, pedophiles, fornicators and so on. The fathers do not know how to love their children in this organization. How does this happen? Just as in any other family, by example. Having lived with and rubbed shoulders with these Bethel elders educates me as to how out of touch and insular they are. And judging by the way that they deal with the young brothers at Bethel, they would no doubt treat their own children the same way, if God forbid, they had some. And it is passed on and on to the children and their children. Fatherless children. I loathed that treatment at Bethel, and you can bet I will fight it forward, exposing these sick old men who rape and pillage their own children.
I am angry here, not for anything the Watchtower did to me, because they didn't manage to hurt me. I KNEW what a real dad was like, I KNEW how God was supposed to be, and that really led me out in the end.