Manhood

One of the primary jobs of a Man is to defend his family. He is also responsible for his children’s education, providing for his family and a dozen other tasks. None of those make any difference if the wolves get at his family first. You cannot educate a child that is living in Montana with a kidnapper.

There have been times when defending the family was done with martial arts, other times with swords. Nowadays the normal line of defense uses a gun. A 12 gauge shotgun for many Men or a Ruger .45 semiautomatic at my house.

Before a man buys his gun there is a mental process that has to be gone trough. These hoodlums walking around with guns tucked into their belts for the world to see do not go through this process, but a real Man does. Before buying that gun, he makes the mental commitment to use that gun if need be. The whole male ego thing might not allow him to talk about it, but a real Man does it. He imagines himself facing the bad guy coming in the back door and goes through the mental exercise of taking a man’s life. He see it. He feels it.

There is a reason for this. Buying the gun but being unable to use it is useless. (An unloaded gun is a very expensive paper weight.) Before the gun is purchased a real Man must be willing to commit himself to the act of using it. That decision, however, is easy because the other image seared on the man’s mind is that of that bad guy getting to his wife. Or his son. Or his little daughter. The Man forces himself to go though this exercise now, so that in the heat of the moment, it is unnecessary.

This is why when a real Man is sitting around the coffee shop and is dropped in the middle of a discussion about a threat – rape, murder, terrorists – the Man is quick to take a hard line approach. Despite any dismay this may cause to most women in the conversation, the Man will stick to this position. The Man is not making a knee jerk reaction. Nor is he acting as a barbarian. He is responding from a long line of deep personal thought and speculation on the topic of good guys versus bad guys. Most women have never had to go though this thought process as deeply as the Man because they don’t plan on shooting anyone who breaks into their house.

The term “women” above is a broad category used for comparative purposes. In this category we may also list males (different from Men) who have abdicated this responsibility. Some have abdicated it by simply ignoring it. They are caught up in the moment, more worried about making the family than what their responsibilities are afterward. Others have defaulted to the police, (security guard, alarm system, dog…) trusting them to provide the security for their family. Content that these substitutes are sufficient, they hide in a fantasy world where they convince themselves they will never have to fulfill their duty of protecting their family. They pretend their Manhood will never be questioned.

Then when our culture ‘matures’ and becomes more ‘enlightened’ and we actually have a controversy in our country of whether or not we should use water-boarding on marauding terrorists, intent on destroying our population and may hold information vital to our survival. The question so often becomes personal: would you do this to someone? You are damn right I would, if i believed it would protect my family or my country. You see it’s not that big of a leap: I am willing to kill a man, with extreme prejudice, if he threatens my family. I can then, quite easily make some murderer feel like he is drowning for less than a minute if he is a threat to my countrymen.

Yet we have men elected or appointed to be leaders of this nation who are squeamish on this procedure. With a hauty air of superiority they declare that we are “above” such actions or that doing so will cause our enemies to treat our captured soldiers worse. Above what? Our soldiers are being stripped naked, drug through streets and beheaded on Internet videos. I think we should be doing all we can to stop the buy guys not simply trying to rise above their level. We are rapidly reaching the point where we have more men who are unwilling to defend our nation than who are willing to defend it. God help us. Someone needs to.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” —Thomas Paine