To Be a Man

I was born in the late 1940s and grew up in the 1950s and was a teenager in the 1960s and was 21 in 1969. When I grew up from a toddler state as a boy I was taught that I would one day have to die if necessary protecting my family or nation. Because this was just after the chaos of world war II and because of the expected nuclear holocaust of earth this was all a given as far as teachers, parents and others were concerned. It was a fight to the death with communism. Fighting to the death or nuking to the death of both cultures and the whole world was expected. Everyone on earth lived with this constantly hanging over their heads.

So, this consciousness of becoming a man as soon as possible so I could die defending my family and nation was engrained into all of us in america. To not be willing to die one was branded a coward or worse. So no matter what anyone actually felt about this they didn't want to be seen as a coward and so talked big. Since I was big always for my age this was easier for me than for many others. By age 13 I was 5 foot 10 inches tall and people didn't pick fights with me because they knew if they got me angry I might kill them by accident at that age. Of course there were always the manly art of standing there and with knuckle raised hitting each other as hard as we could on the upper arm as a sort of counting coup and a preventative. If one could receive a terrible blow without flinching or crying out a fight was averted. Then the other boy had to also withstand a terrible blow to the upper arm with knuckle raised for the fight to be averted. In this way(even though both boys would have a quarter sized black and blue mark that hurt like hell for a week or more the fight had been averted by being tough). It was more like sparring than anything else. what was important was courage and toughness. If one could keep from flinching or crying out in pain one had won the battle and had won enough respect to prevent an all out fight in most cases.

My best friend was not as lucky as me because he wasn't as tall or as physically strong as me. So one day one of the bullies went to far with him in High School so he called the bully out(arranged a time to fight after school). My friend was winning the fight so the bully got my friend in a head lock and started banging his head into a brick wall. So to keep his brains my friend had to give in. Even though this was a very unfair thing for the bully to do it was done. However, it permanently ended this problem with the bully as he had got to bloodied up himself to continue to survive this conflict any longer. My friend probably had a concussion but back then we didn't go to hospitals ever unless we had a broken arm or were dying, and sometimes not even then. It was just a completely different mindset than now.

My wife was telling my teenage daughter that there are 7 men in jail for every 1 female in jail. I said this was because women almost always find someone to take care of them if things go wrong in their lives. This is almost never true of men.

So no matter how bad things get in mens lives they are alone. They live or die alone. It has always been this way. Men have always been expendable in this way. The only exception to this sometimes is when they are fathers and their family needs them no matter what. Otherwise men are alone usually after age 18 or after college unless they create a family of friends of one kind or another.

Most men that wind up in jail do so because they have nowhere to turn when things get bad. And after going to jail and being violated they are no longer men in their own eyes and have all sorts of psychological problems from dealing with that that often make them stay criminals because they are angry at society.

So, the best way to describe what it is to be a man is "Sink or Swim". Sometime between the ages of 18 and 25 we are all thrown into the middle of the ocean(so to speak) to "sink or swim". Those that survive swim and the rest sink to the bottom and drown. It has always been this way. Many women and girls never entirely understand this. And when they don't they have trouble with the boys and men in their lives because of not understanding this one thing about men.