Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you with your most important job being a dad.

These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy, by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

What will you be able to say?

We all remember marveling to our grandparents about what they experienced. What was the

depression like? What did great-grandpa say about Ellis Island? Was the Cold War scary? We've asked

our own parents about whether they protested this conflict or that policy. Perhaps we've even had to

wrestle more recently with our ancestors' lack of involvement and now what seemed like obvious movements.

Where were you during civil rights? How could they not have joined the French resistance?

This kind of reckoning is part of the timeless march of history.

Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, grappled all his life with his father's decision to hire a

substitute to fight in the

civil war instead of enlisting for the union. But part of understanding that this has always happened

shouldn't just comfort you about your ancestors, should also spur you in your own family.

Because history is happening right now. We're in the middle of a horrible slow burning pandemic.

We're at the beginning of a kind of second or third reconstruction in America, and there are

countless other issues on the world stage from the Uyghurs in China to migrant and refugee crises.

You're fooling yourself if you don't see that as your kids get older and their kids too,

that they are going to ask you, where were you? What did you do? And they're not going to accept,

well, I was busy raising you guys. They're not going to look with much reverence with a person

who just said, I didn't think there was much I could do.

They're not going to accept it was far away, or it wasn't my fight.

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