Please take a look. If you like this, if you think it is at all important, please forward it to others.

My book, What Else But Home, is descriptive. The Open Letter is a touch normative. Only a touch.

I'm NOT an actor (dah...), so the TEXT of what I wrote:

Father's Day, June 21, 2009

Dear Fathers of My Sons,

You and I have never met. Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1998, our two sons took my wife and I onto a black top baseball field in Manhattan's Lower East Side. We met and befriended five older boys there--your sons. Each of your sons eventually joined our family, moving into our home. We began and continue to parent them.

Last week, one of the older boys and I went to an Emotions Anonymous meeting. I near forced him there, our first time, but minutes into the meeting he was telling strangers about the day you died. It was his fault, he said, because he'd asked you for money for an ice cream. You were waiting on the corner for your change and he watched you knifed. "Four times in the heart," he says. Everything afterwards was his fault, too; the string of homeless shelters, his mom never putting herself back together. His guilt. The rage that's hobbled him.

I watch each of your boys, hobbled; the trauma, abuse, misery, the emotional death inside prison, the too early death through deterioration that follows, all a too fast generation after generation condemnation to underclass.

Each of the five bigger boys graduated high school, a miracle of hard work and guidance. But four of them have dropped out of college, restarted and dropped out again. They've left courses for a myriad of excuses, taken leaves of absence here, Upstate, out of state so often I've lost track. But we keep encouraging them. They start new plans towards futures and we dream again of their walking across that divide between the college educated and not. But someone insults them at work, asks them to do what they consider beneath their dignity and they refuse, argue, quit or are fired. A White baseball umpire is racist for calling strikes our son knows aren't. He yells at the umpire with profanity, is kicked out of the game, argues with his college coach, is kicked off the team and can no longer handle classes. There's no more baseball and his Minor League possibilities evaporate even while we knew Major League teams had him on their "to watch" lists.

Our sons worlds are full of obstacles.

So how do we, every father touching our sons' lives, help reduce the rage, cool the resentment that smolders and too often combusts and sabotages the brightness of their futures? How do we fill that well of oppression dug deep from their earliest years?
You know the pitfalls our sons face. They were certainly yours. None of this is your fault, and all of it is. None of it is mine and all of it is.

And no one simple thing will stop the poverty, except staying in your sons' lives is crucial, and I beg this of you.

I don't presume that you had so much choice about your ways. Your lives were often lived in misery and deprivation.

But we become adults, and cannot blame everything on the misfortune of circumstance. Explanation and excuse are no longer the same. We must take responsibility if we chose to procreate, or more straightforwardly, chose the acts of procreation.

If you're not going to stay with their mothers, then stay in your sons' lives. Do not put yourselves in those places to be murdered--as two of you were. Do not put yourself in the position to be locked up for so long to miss your sons' lives--as one of you has. Do not lose track of your sons through choice--as two of you have. Live nearby. If you're going to father another handful or more of children with other women, find ways to still hold our sons' hands. Hug them. Teach them to throw, catch and hit a baseball. Take them shopping for their first mitts. Watch them in pick up games in the park, in their first Little League games. Watch them in as many ways after as you can. Read. And read. Then read more, to them as babies, toddlers, first and second graders. Go to parent-teacher nights. Review their homework. Let them know, besides the obvious of baseball, music and girls being paramount, that nothing is more equally important than good grades and graduating from college--before having their own children. If they do have children early, then encourage them to be good fathers and also stay in college; because college graduation, more than most other things, affords the break from poverty.

I'm certain, these eleven years of raising your sons, that the absence of fathering leaves a hole deep in the psyches of children that too much dysfunction festers within. I also know that fathering--the role of raising, not the biology of procreation--is not the solution that will break the crippling rut of poverty. Government and private programs created to help--daycare, better schools, extraordinary teachers, after school opportunities, Big Brother, summer camps--all certainly must. But fathering is a central part of raising sons, fathering is private and personal, fathering is broken, and needs to be repaired. Stay alive. Stay out of prison. Stay involved. I know that's practically impossible, yet absolutely necessary for all our children and all of theirs, if the cycle of poverty and its oppression is to end.

With Love, Michael