Posted on by Randy Slovacek

A Photo Between Father & Son Struck Some As ‘Awkward?’

Hunter Biden with his dad, Joe Biden

Part of what’s wrong with some folks today…I just see a father who loves his son. My dad had no problem telling me he loved me.

But apparently, some on Twitter think this is ‘awkward.’

The photo was from an interview feature for Popular Mechanics in 2016 between former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter after the death of the vice president’s other son, Beau, to cancer.

Tom Nichols at USA Today gets it right:

It is, in its way, an awkward image. The son looking into the camera, his face calm but haunted. The father’s face is partly hidden, as he embraces his son and puts a kiss on his cheek.

The son is young and strong, and his arms are sturdy as they gently rest around his father. But the father, while old, is even stronger. One arm is in front of his child, the other around the son’s shoulder, as if to hold on to him and to protect him at the same time.

It is a picture of Joe and Hunter Biden, but it would be moving enough were it of any father and son. Even strangers to these men would know what it means. All of us, after all, were once children. (The picture is really a portrait of the son, not the father.)

In this case, to know the circumstances in which it was taken is to know that it is a picture full of pain, love, forgiveness and acceptance, and to look at it for even more than a moment is to experience at least some of those emotions, especially in the memory of our own parents or children.