Being A Man

The idea of “Being A Man” is not exactly politically correct these days.  It conjures images of sexism and patriarchy and misogyny and subjugation of women.  If you will bear with me we will look at what I was taught it means to be a real man as opposed to the current stereotype.

When I was a young boy my dad would constantly try to prepare me for the fact that I was going to “be a man” some day and I needed to be prepared to step up and take responsibility.  It was a pretty standard approach when I grew up in the 60’s.  Fathers spent years teaching their sons what it meant to take responsibility not just for your own life but those of your wife and children.

You had to know a lot of practical things like how to fish and take care of a car and a shoot a rifle and maintain everything around the house.  You had to be proficient with power tools and be able to change a tire, and you needed to know how to balance a checkbook and get from place to place without consulting a map.

I had great role models.  Virgil Jett lived next door.  Mr. Jett was a big man, an electrician and my Dad’s best friend.  He was a Baptist.  Virgil knew things.  He worked at Union Electric and had to go climb utility poles during ice storms.  He drove a truck.  Virgil was responsible.  He took care of his family.

Mr. Jett.  Mr. Ferree. Mr. Primm. Pastor Niblack.  Scoutmaster Harrison.  Mr. Lantz and Mr. Cowan.  These were some of my male role models.  All were responsible and competent and each of them had expectations of me.  They expected me to honor my commitments.  They expected the truth. They expected my best effort and they demanded I treat others with respect, the same way they did.  They modeled the behavior that they wanted to see.

There was a commonality to these messages.  At it’s core the message was very simple, and we understood it intuitively.  Simply put, there are consequences that result from the decisions you make and the actions you take.  Good decisions result in good consequences and vice versa.  And real men take responsibility for the consequences that result from their actions.

We were taught that effort was rewarded.  Lifting makes you stronger, running makes you faster, and studying makes you smarter.  The world I grew up in made sense.  Cause followed effect.  We were also taught that compassion is when we voluntarily take some of the consequences of someone else’s poor decisions.  We were taught to forgive those who wronged us if they took responsibility and were truly sorry.  We were taught to apologize when we were wrong.

When we started playing sports we learned other things.  We learned lessons about sportsmanship and competition and teamwork and responsibility and commitment. We learned about winning and losing.  We learned that when the contest is over we shake the other guy’s hand.  When we win we do not gloat and when we lose we acknowledge the other guy’s victory.

The men who served as our role models demanded that we acted like gentlemen.  Blalock and Konneman and Beckmeyer and Linson and Fischer and Fullerton and Newcomb all had expectations and they were not low ones.  We were taught that in order to improve we had to acknowledge our weaknesses and fix them, rather than masking or hiding them.  We were taught to challenge our assumptions and see other points of view.

Real men have integrity.  Integrity is when what you do and think and say are all the same because your values are integrated into who you are and there is no dissonance.  Integrity   requires character.  A real man takes responsibility for his own life and his own happiness.  Real men own their lives and their actions.

I remember one time in college I was in Dr. Reed’s class and he had just finished doing a proof of something or another and he presented us with a new equation.  These were the days of chalk and erasers and Dr. Reed had a nasty habit of writing with one hand and erasing with the other so we learned to write fast without necessarily processing it as we wrote.  I remember asking him something about the equation and whose equation it was.

“Mr. Rakestraw, given that you now have the ability to derive this equation yourself and do the proof based on other known equations you now own it.  It is yours.”, he said.  I have thought about that quite a bit over the years.  Once an idea is truly mine; once I understand it thoroughly and can explain it to others, then I really own it.  Until that time it really has no meaning.

The same is true of values.  Once you truly internalize a value it is yours and once you integrate it into your being you make it truly part of who you are.

If you have ever raised children you know the challenge involved. All of the grand ideas about how things are supposed to be get set to the side when we understand the reality that is a two and a half month old child with a bit of colic.  Parents inevitably learn what works by trial and error.  As anyone who has gone through it knows it can be terrifying and uncomfortable.  Children will challenge everything you ever thought you knew.  But it is our responsibility to give them the tools they need to be responsible and successful.

It is time we as parents and parents step up and teach our children values again.

The other day CNN did a special town hall with Speaker Paul Ryan.  They discussed a number of topics including Obamacare and immigration and Speaker Ryan is a great politician who handled the topics with grace and humor.  He reassured everyone they nobody was going to lose their healthcare anytime soon and that they would both deport the bad guys who were committing crimes and leave the good guys alone who were just here supporting families.

Jake Tapper then pointed out to the Speaker that we have a huge opioid and heroin epidemic and the Speaker agreed.

This week the US Senate voted on a plan that will spend $10 trillion more than incoming revenues over the next few years.  That is the plan.  This morning we hear of two different proposals, each of which will reduce tax revenue by over $6 trillion over the next few years.  Our federal debt now stands at just over $20 trillion.

There is something extremely dysfunctional about all of this.  Somehow, we have lost touch with reality and our leaders keep mumbling things that don’t make any sense.  You cannot dramatically increase spending and dramatically cut taxes and expect any reduction in the debt.  You cannot repeal a dysfunctional Obamacare and replace it with all the essential elements of the current plan and expect it not to be equally dysfunctional.

A real man knows when he has done something wrong, or when he needs help.  Real men will admit the truth and apologize.  Real men understand humility and when it is required and why.  Real men know the difference between a request for help and a demand for help.  I was raised by men who were very compassionate and they helped me a lot, but they were not about to coddle me or enable bad behavior.  There was a reason for that.

When we shield people from consequences we do them a disservice.  We do not allow them to develop the inner strength that comes from overcoming adversity.  We also give them a false perception of reality.  Good parents make an effort to let their children work through challenges and frustrations on their own so they develop the skills needed to work through problems going forward.

It seems to me that a generation of people may have been given the wrong message.  They may have been taught the wrong paradigm.  Our young people often seem bewildered and confused.  I think we may have a personal responsibility crisis.  Each little loss of personal responsibility is cumulative and we now have people totally disconnected from the concept.  We are not helping people when we do not provide them with the skills necessary to be responsible for their own lives.

Life is hard.  Life has always been hard.  Bad things happen and they always will.  But the vast majority of people on this planet are good people.  They work hard and try to do the right things and they take responsibility for their lives.  They have compassion for others and they want what is right but they do not have all day to figure out exactly what that is and they know cannot fix every problem but they want to help.

A thousand years ago it was 1017 AD.  I was not there but we can all more or less picture what life must have been like back then for the average human.  Pretty rough by today’s standards; very little technology and most people were quite poor.  Life was hard.  People were ruled by kings and freedom was a fairly meaningless term to most.  A thousand years before that it was 17 AD and in many ways the lives of ordinary people did not improve much in that 1000 years.

A hundred years ago it was 1917.  We have come a long way since then.  Certainly we came farther from 1917 to today that we did from 1817 to 1917.  The advancements in the last 25 years have been truly revolutionary in the history of man in terms of technology and lifestyle, but with all we have gained I fear we have lost something.  I fear we are losing the concept of personal responsibility.

All of that advancement in technology and improvements in lifestyle have outpaced our ability to cope with these changes as a society.  We have lost sight of our values.

As we move to fix big problems in society today we need to consider the ramifications of our policies.  The systems we create have to work.  Budgets have to balance.  We have to prioritize our wants and needs and make tough choices.  This is uncomfortable but necessary because a system that does not work will not be helpful to anyone in the long term.

As we craft a replacement for Obamacare we should look to return the system to one of free markets.  Free markets work to set pricing and deliver products efficiently.  Individual responsibility means everyone has skin in the game.  Charity and compassion should be available to those who have made mistakes and admitted them and corrected course, but not to enable bad behavior.

The weak cannot help the weak.  Only the strong can help the weak.  But one need not be male or a man to be strong or to have integrity.  And strong people can also have compassion.  We need to be strong to stand up to evil but not so proud that we cannot admit to our own weaknesses.

We are responsible for preparing the next generation for the reality of the challenges they will face, some of which we created and left them with.  We need to come to terms with what we have done and acknowledge our mistakes and fix them.  It is time for us to step up and teach our little boys (and girls) to be real men once again.