11 Pride and Joy

Who is your pride and joy?
​We're sharing insights from the songs on The Neo Now's new album 'Rainbow Coloured Dynamite'. What are the songs about? Where did the songs come from? Next up: 'Pride and Joy'
This is a confronting heart-wrenching solemn song about the generational impacts of family violence and more specifically, the role of a Father in a family.
It's not something that people often sing about, we know!
The world seems a little fatherless at times. We heard a statistic about who visits women in jail and it was shown that fathers are very rare visitors. Where are the fathers?
Every 15th May is the International Day of the Family, and in Australia, White Ribbon Day brings awareness to violence of men against women.
We recently heard the testimonies of a men's transformations program that runs in our community and can't help but wonder if there's violence at the heart of all their stories.
And we wonder if the source of that violence is the heart-break experienced by men who are put in harms' way in the first place? Our men need a voice, they need a chance to heal, they need to know they are valuable and loved.
That violence gets turns inward on yourself and outwards on others. And it rolls like a dirty fiery sandstorm across generations upon generations.
Where does it stop? That's the point we get to in 'Pride and Joy'. The father in the song-story makes a different choice, a more conscious choice of courage and honesty. Honesty to say 'hey, I'm hurting' and the courage to do break the generational pattern.
We're not saying this experience is everywhere, we're telling one little story in the story of all violence.