But not the kind you think. I got here the old fashioned way. By living long enough to watch 75 to 80% of everyone I knew and loved die. I watched while (over the years) first my granparents, then my Aunts and Uncles and parents, and now finally the last 10 years while most of my parents and friends died. Though I'm only 62 (which seems quite young to me in some ways) 80% of everything that gave my life meaning as I grew up has died including big stars like Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Jane Mansfield, Bobby Darin, and all the rest of the people who I loved and who inspired me like Gandhi all died. Though Gandhi died 4 months before I was born in 1948 still his influence lives on maybe forever like Mandela and Martin Luther King will by his side.
No. I'm not a TV or Movie Time traveler but a real one who has loved and grieved and gone on somehow in spite of every loss. I have not succombed to alcoholism or drugs or killing myself over someone I loved(though I came very close at at 21 to 23) but somehow made it through all the agony and ecstasy of one's 20s. My thirties I look back upon enviously. At that time I knew who I was and had let go of the completely unrealistic expectations of one's twenties that break so many into unrecognizable bits before they become ultimately pragmatic enough to go on and just survive for their families and friends. But my 30s were mostly wonderful. I home schooled my son from my first marriage and my two step kids from my second in an idyllic place on 2 1/2 acres of land on Mt. Shasta. We built and A-Frame 10 miles from the nearest little town and lived a Mt. Shasta Wilderness family life for 4 years there while we home schooled our kids using Oak Meadow School independent study curriculum which is still doing this 30 years later and I believe is still pretty reasonable.
No. I'm a real time traveler who grew up in a world of real men and now I'm in a very changed world that is more a world of women than a world of men any longer. The only real John Wayne's these days are fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq for the world has become so different to me now that I don't recognize it at all.
Someone was saying what has happened in a useful way that I could recognize. In the U.S. of the 7 millions jobs lost that probably won't return any time soon, 5 million of those job losses were men and only 2 million of those jobs were women. Since companies pay women only 75 to 80% of what they pay men, why should they hire the men back. Another way society castrates men figuratively in ways that wouldn't have been tolerated in the 1950s. Men were still men then. They are no longer mostly.
Though people are more civilized now men have been confused and lost in the equation completely. I'm not sure women understand how harmed men have been in the changes of the last 50 years. But the best way to say it is we are no longer a society of men and women but of women and women. And until all this stuff gets more balanced out and realistic in some real way we all will continue to be living a lie. Don't get me wrong it is a utopian lie so maybe it will lead to something good. But how do you get to something good if all the real men have been bred out of a society by women who now seem to run everything?
However, the above was the way I was raised to be, talking. I had to evolve beyond that through many many experiences. I had to witness all the very real suffering of women in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. I watched while it was okay for men to have affairs on their wives and then lie to them about it. I watched these women slowly go insane as their men lied to them about things like this even as they bragged to other men (including me and other adolescent boys) of their exploits. And I knew this was cruel to these women beyond thinking. But in that time men often were men's men and they saw women many times as beasts of burden and not even human in a sense. All that has changed now(at least in the U.S) even though it is still like this throughout the world even now.
So, in some ways the U.S. stands as a beacon of hope to women everywhere, that one day men in their country will value them as equals and not just as things to get pregnant and to babysit the kids while they grow up, while they secretly teach the boys to continue this kind of thinking and to perpetuate women as second class citizens ongoing.
No. I see all the good done for women and I applaud that. It's just as a man I also see all the damage done to men in how confused they all are now. Being a man meant one thing for hundreds of thousands of years. If we change all that now what will be the long term consequences? Will it be good or bad?
The answer is it will be both good and bad for everyone. Because in the end life on earth is literally Descartes philosophic statement, "There is nothing so good that no bad may come from it and nothing so bad that no good may come from it."
In the real world there is no ultimate good or bad but only shades of gray. Real men know how to deal with this and real women need to also.
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