The Challenge of Organizing, by Pater

A couple weeks back I had the privilege of attending the Sigint class at Matt’s home-base in North Carolina. This was my first class training with him and I was excited to discover that the training area was relatively close by. Matt is fond of saying that his training classes are just like all the best times he ever had in the military without any of the bullshit and from my experience training with him I wholeheartedly agree. I spent a few years doing the weekend warrior bit in the reserves, and though I didn’t really see much in the way of action, there was always plenty of bullshit to go around. There were also many good times as well, spent training with good men towards a common goal and the time I spent training at the GC the other weekend reminded me very much of the best of those days. The class time was top notch, but what rivalled even that was the conversations that took place throughout the evening after class ended each day.

A topic of discussion that came up one evening was on the difficulty of establishing connections with other like-minded men in our own day to day lives. The individual who had raised the point lived in the suburbs near several major cities. In the area where he lived it was hard enough to meet people you could honestly discuss politics with, let alone folks who were interested in expanding their skillsets with rifles, radios, and reconnaissance patrols. He had found that he seemed to be a bit of a rare bird in his neck of the woods.

Despite the seeming rarity of his kind, his situation is not a unique one. In fact, ironically, it could be argued that men like him are far more common than they realize, even in their own community. The desire to preserve and protect family, culture, traditions, and community is a large part of what makes us men. Striving to achieve mastery of the skills that allows us to do this is what separates the serious man from the perpetual adolescent. Unfortunately, fifty years of social engineering has done an excellent job of stifling these instincts in men and made such matters unfit for discussion in polite society. The family as an institution has been ravaged and the responsibility and authority of the father to raise and protect his family has been denigrated and undermined at every opportunity. However, God made men in a particular way, God knows his business, and the desire to preserve and protect is an instinct that is latent within us and still resonates with most men you’ll meet.  The challenge we face today is finding the time and space to cultivate these instincts in a meaningful way. This was a challenge my Brother-in-law and I faced a few years back and I believe there are some decent lessons to be learned from our experiences.

In March 2020 my wife and I left the small town I had grown up in and moved across the state for a new job I had just started in the mountains. Our plan was to join a local parish and begin making connections in the community through our church. Then they closed all the churches and every other point of personal community interaction. The lock downs were a strange and lonely time and having just relocated to the area made it all the stranger. My sister and her husband lived in the next town over, but other than them there wasn’t any network of existing connections to fall back on. Getting to know the masked strangers next door was a nonstarter, especially as no one seemed to want to come within thirty feet of you, and God forbid you lower your mask to say hello. The social distance between us and the rest of the world seemed insurmountable.  We were in a poor position and it was not a good time.

Luckily, for us, this madness was short-lived. We purchased a house out in the country that June and shortly after my other sister and brother-in-law and my parents and younger brother had also all moved to the same area. We found a small mission parish that was the center of the traditionalist community in our part of the state and had a healthy disregard for the silly mandates of the Covidians.

It was around this time that my brother-in-law and I did a lot of talking about how the world had changed. We noted how quickly so many people had become cut off from their own communities, and how effective the lies had been with people isolated in their own little bubble where their perception of reality was mediated solely through the lens of social media. It occurred to us that the surest antidote against these lies was through re-establishing community ties at the most basic face-to-face level. For quite a few months every third Thursday, our wives had been attending a “mom’s night out” organized by one of the ladies at our church. We decided it’d be terribly unfortunate for the ladies to have all the fun, and so we decided to organize a father’s night out as well on the following Thursday of each month.

Invitations were extended to other fathers in our parish community, and the first few gatherings we had primarily involved a half dozen guys or so watching an old war movie and drinking a few cold beers. Indubitably, a good time was had by all. Other times we’d have a bonfire, or a chess tournament, or just sit around the kitchen table discussing the finer points of just war theory from Augustine and Aquinas to the present. Hours were spent some evenings comparing notes on how all the late madness had affected each of us in our respective careers as doctors, soldiers, restauranteurs, police officers and tradesman.

All of the men who came out to our dad’s nights had known each other in passing through church, but most of us had never really had the opportunity to get to know each other. Taking one night out of the month to gather together and converse allowed for many follow-on opportunities that may not have happened otherwise. One of the fathers in our group was a martial arts instructor in the Air Force. A number of us were able to attend twice a week Jui Jitsu classes that he offered free of charge to any of the guys who were interested. Some men had experience as firearms instructors and were able to share their expertise with other fathers who had never shot a gun before in their lives. Other men had experience with radio comms and were able to take an evening or two to kick some classes on how to actually run the Baofengs that had been sitting collecting dust on a shelf for the last couple years.

My brother-in-law and I have been running our monthly ‘Night of the Fathers’ gatherings for a couple years now with turn out varying anywhere from three guys to a dozen or so guys depending on when it is and who happens to be hosting that evening. We keep in regular contact with all the men who come out and all of us look out for each other in whatever way our skillsets and expertise allow. The group that has formed around our gatherings is largely drawn from one particular faith community, but the basic format of what we’ve been doing can be replicated across most any community.

One of the big advantages of organizing social gathering like a “Dad’s Night” is that it allows you the opportunity to sound out the other men in your community and get a feel for where they stand on things in a no pressure informal environment. Why are we here? Well, we’ve all got kids, the wife’s got them this evening, and we’re all going to watch “The Dirty Dozen” and drink a couple brewskis and talk about how hard our grandfathers generation was. Pretty chill. Next month comes around, we’ll be doing a game night, playing chess or poker or something and talking about the war in Ukraine or the rising criminality in our cities or the millions of undocumented illegals coming into the country from who knows where. The whole time you can be sounding out responses, finding out where everyone stands and doing what you can to nudge Joe Normie away from the Sean Hannity’s, Buck and Clay’s and Ben Shapiro’s and more towards the Victor David Hansen’s, Bill Buppert’s, or Mike Farris’s of the interwebs. Additionally, its an opportunity to share knowledge and encourage other men to expand their skillsets and improve their individual positions.

Another advantage of the dad’s night organizational principal is you’ll be dealing with men with family’s in your communities. This is important for a number of reasons. First, you will be dealing with men who have actively contributed to the continuation of our culture and traditions by siring the next generation. These aren’t a bunch of manchild hedonistic dinks living for the moment, these are men who have sacrificed their own individual freedom in order to love one woman and raise a family. These are men who are invested in making their community better for their children. Second, these are men who are tied to your particular community in multiple ways, which encourages honesty and stability. It’s relatively easy to be a fly-by-night instigator when you’re young and single and can take off somewhere else at the drop of a hat. Its much harder for a married family man with a family to pull stakes and disappear in the middle of the night. Naturally, there will be exceptions to this, but they will be rare.

There are many challenges that we confront organizing for purpose, but there are always ways to mitigate risks. If you’re a married man with kids, taking the time to organize a dad’s night in you community may prove to be a great way to meet other like-minded men in a setting that is unburdened by the baggage of prepping groups, gun clubs or political organizing. If nothing else, it’s a good excuse to have a couple cold beers and chill with the guys, and I would highly recommend all of the Patres Familias out there giving it a shot, you’ve really got nothing to lose.

-Pater