Spring and the 2% Wu Wei Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow. Rain. Donyce. Ruth. Gabe. Tom. Pain. Talmud Torah. Mussar. Men’s group. CBE. Marilyn and Irv. Primo’s. Aspen Perks. Conifer Cafe. Dandelion. Bread Lounge. Golden Stix. My son. Seoah. The Jangs. Coming to America.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Toys for Shadow

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Sat here yesterday with two good friends, Tom and Shadow, Shadow circling, coming up to Tom’s arm, then moving away, yes, I want to know you, but slowly, maybe next time a bit more, I don’t know you, not sure about you, sniff, sniff, sniff, maybe next time a bit more.

 

Shadow has wounds. Trauma. Probably inflicted by a man. Deep voice. Tall. (to her). She cowers sometimes when I put out my hand. Not always now, a big advance. Like many of us H. Sapiens she wants, needs connection, yet fears it, too. A sadness on my part. As Tom said, don’t you love belonging to the gender and race guilty of so much abuse? Oh, yeah.

Wondering again. About the material I read about boys in American schools. About the young college men my granddaughter describes as infected with toxic masculinity. Not worth giving a try. About men like the Proud Boys, the Promise Keepers, the red-hatted flush-faced American flag waving believers in replacement theory and the strange ideas of the incels.

My gut tells me its time, past time, to focus on men and boys the same energy Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan and Angela Davis and Michelle Obama gave to women and girls.

But how. Men. Stoic. Loyal. Competitive. Strong physically. Crippled emotionally. Fearful. Often cowardly. Bert Lahr lions and/or tin men.

I suppose that’s not a bad a way to think about it. American men fell asleep among the poppies on the yellow brick road. They never got a heart or a brain. Instead they use dominance and aggression where empathy and camaraderie would better serve. They pledge allegiance to false idols like conservative Christianity, MAGA, white supremacy rather than using reason leavened with compassion.

How can we wake them up? Shake them up? Not as Republicans or MAGA-men, but first as men. As fathers, brothers, sons, friends, lovers.

I have a hunch that woke men would defeat the red-hat menace all on their own. Would realize the damage being done not only to their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters but to themselves. Let alone our suffering nation once a shining city on a hill now a landfill for the refuse of buried tenderness and thwarted love.

I know I’m complicit. Raised a white man in mid-last century Indiana, subject to all the ills available to young boys and men back then.

That is, of course, the huge issue when thinking about a masculinist movement, a masculinism for our time. We are not oppressed, rather we are repressed. We do not need empowerment, rather we need softening, gentling. No marches for men’s rights. We have more than our share.

The men’s movement, in which I have a small role, has failed to become widespread. It has failed to change the trajectory of masculinity in any appreciable way.

My granddaughter won’t date the men we’ve raised. As many young women will not. Can you blame them?

Perhaps even more than defeating our own Mussolini we need to learn how to become human. How to wake our brothers asleep among the poppies. Get them back on the yellow brick road to see the wizard.