Was John Lennon… a Failure?

“Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son.”

Julian Lennon.

Ouch! And then he also said…

“I love his music. I respect what he did with The Beatles. But I don’t respect him as a father — and in some ways, not even as a man.” (reported in various interviews and public recountings).

I stumbled upon these quotes on social media, and they caught my attention in a culture rapidly losing any sense of meaning.

These words from a forgotten son of one of our icons of Love reminded me of something comedian Tim Minchin said in an interview. He questioned whether stressing oneself and virtue signaling online actually helped the world or distracted us from doing real good in our families and communities. Jordan Peterson makes a similar point in his work: many people think they know how to save the world when they can’t even get along with their family members.

While John Lennon was busy in bed trying to give peace a chance, as he imagined all the people…he forgot his own son.

Now, I know life is complicated. But I feel it’s the theme of the decline of the West. We have Elon Musk making more children (in ethically questionable ways) than he has time for while he desperately tries to get to Mars.

Even though Musk is making his children like they are some kind of Amazon order doesn’t mean I think he shouldn’t have children. Children are our nature, and we should be ready to take on the role of parent if we are eager to engage in our nature.

But we must be present for them .

I don’t buy the “I’m just not the parenting type.”

It’s a rite of passage.

Something higher we are called to embrace.

Something that naturally occurs when we let nature take its course.

But what modernity has told men and now women is that children may sometimes need to come second as you offer your unique (eco-centric) gifts to the world.

And many progressives, like Lennon, get caught up in trying to solve never-ending global problems while they let the people in their real world feel like a bomb has gone off.

I personally got very emotionally caught up in the environmental movement. In my heart, I believed I was doing it for the love of my son and the broader community, but one day my husband said, “I wish you cared as much about us as you do about this environment.” I was stunned. I hated the environmental talk, but I had become obsessed with it out of some misguided sense of duty. I’d much prefer to drop it all. I was doing all of this FOR love.

My husband wasn’t saying it to make me feel guilty; it was soft in tone, he understood I was genuinely passionate and meant well…but yes, he was right, all the creativity and energy I put into that topic pulled me away from caring for the small but meaningful world right in front of me. Several moments of realisation snapped me out of this and back to focusing on family and immediate community, and I could not be more grateful for this awakening to come now… while my son was still very small and my husband not completely drained.

Men have always found this balance harder to strike. Traditionally, they had to provide for the family, and this meant focusing on something outside of the home, excelling in something the community needed. It’s a sacrifice that many women have seen only as a privilege - a privilege available to men.

Now, we have both men and women outside the home desperately trying to save their world while their home and the relationships within it crumble. It’s now seen as admirable to go out and be somebody to hundreds, thousands, or millions of people, while the little child at home attempts to understand why they are so boring, why they are so easy to put aside in the guise of “but I’m doing this FOR you.”

A selfish person, out to make a name or a lot of money, ignoring their children, makes sense. This happens; those types exist. They always have and they always will. But I’m talking about the do-gooders. The ones who think they are saving the world by “f%&ing the patriarchy” or endlessly protesting in outrage…FOR love, I’m speaking about these, or the ones who think their art is more important than the miracle handed to them in the form of a child…those are the ones I want to listen to this.

The world has gone mad.

No one knows what’s Left or Right, what’s up or down, or if AI is going to take their job in the coming years.

You cannot save this world, not on the scale you think you can.

It cannot be saved.

But if we all focused on our husbands and wives, our homes, our children, our neighbours…if we worked on big, true sacrificial love, responsibility, dedication, and basked in the beauty of what is right in front of us…

We might be able to save our children.

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Thank you for reading.

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