I don’t watch the news much these days so I am often late finding out about world events. This morning, I learned of the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Facebook. In a world that seems to be spiraling into an ever-darker abyss, this is one more crushing blow to all that is good. But, this will not be a post filled with all the good that RBG brought to the world. I have no doubt these are being spread far and wide at the moment, as they should be. Instead, this is a post about fathers and daughters.

At this time, I cannot help but think about fathers and their daughters, and here is an example why. Where I live in rural NH, there is a house that is positioned near the entrance to our small town. It is on the corner of three bisecting roads and just off a main highway that connects the state to its neighbors. Inside the house lives father who is in the military, his wife, and their two daughters. Their vast yard is punctuated across its perimeter with more signs for the POTUS than I care to count. Including one so large it could easily fill the side of a school bus.

They are a white family, privileged by the world’s standards, raising two strong girls, from what I hear. I don’t know them personally. But each time I pass the house, I am reminded of all the privileged white men with daughters in the world who are asserting their support of another privileged white man, who happens to also be deeply misogynistic, a likely rapist multiple times over, and an individual who is doing his best to strip away women’s rights. Including their daughters’.

Each time I pass this house, I think about all the progress women like RBG, and many others of both sexes, who have worked tirelessly to ensure that all lives matter equally. I keep thinking about what a father is telling to his daughters when he stakes his over-large sign on their yard to assert that, in essence, their lives don’t really matter. And, I am deeply, deeply, troubled by the notion that there are so many who are pushing their daughters into the shadows to assert their power as privileged white men.