One of the encouraging factors of attending DEFCON over the years is watching some of the geeks grow up. One I met when he was about 14 and sleeping on the floor of someone’s room, just to be at DEFCON. Now he is a husband and father. I remember watching one of the major rebels walking around with his son on his shoulders. Good stuff.
This year we went to dinner with a man who from his stories was a barbarian of the first order. I believe his stories. Yet the man I ate dinner with was sitting with his son between him and his wife and demonstrating how to be a good father. The boy had some issues and I watched this hard core hacker showing affection and support in a way that would put most of us to shame. I was impressed. It was encouraging.
It was the miracle of fatherhood. We didn’t discuss it but my guess is that if you had tried to explore being a father with him fifteen years ago he would have looked at you like a zombie from a grade B movie, overlooking the fact that all zombie movies are grade B. He would have wondered what you had been smoking and he probably knew all the possibilities. He would have laughed in your face. Yet when put in a situation where he faced the fruit of his loins he did not walk away like so many ghetto daddies. He manned up and in the process learned the meaning of love. This is why marriage and fatherhood does so much to civilize the men of our culture. This is why the welfare system that makes men responsibility free from their spawn is so destructive.
It isn’t music that really tames the savage beast, it is fatherhood.
homo unius libri
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