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As you may know, I’ve owned a record store near the Ohio State campus for the past 23 years. So I’ve seen enough budding adults to be a sociologist of some sort. And here’s one of my recent findings, which I’ve become painfully and annoyingly aware of: Young men these days are beyond sensitive. They make Dan Fogelberg look like a drill sergeant. They’re incapable of functioning in the environment formerly called Reality or, perhaps, more brutally, The World.
These guys come into the store all moody, withdrawn and easily bruised. Ask them if they need help and they can only mumble half a dozen self-pitying syllables, actually communicating nothing other than a complete inability to form a coherent sentence and project something more than a sense of incomprehensible tragedy. We’re talking, kid for kid, a generation of sadness with no basis for its sorrow. Not the girls, though. Just the dudes.
Welcome to the limp upper lip generation.
I am tired of young men who can’t find the Wilco vinyl because they won’t turn around and flip through four divider cards. I’m tired of young men who, when they can’t discover their favorite Iron & Wine album, droop their shoulders and say, “That sucks.” I’m really tired of young men who let their mothers make them take meds because they had a rough freshman year in college. Everybody has a rough first year. And I’m tired of young men who, when they finally do learn to articulate, talk as if they have something to say; the illogical, whiny stuff I hear masquerading as critical thought is enough to make me laugh—and I do.
Weak. Lame. Pathetic.
Who’s to blame? My theory is the therapeutic, over-feminized educational system that is biased against boys being boys.
What to do? How do we restore masculinity and stoic self-reliance?
First, let boys play rough, climb trees and learn by falling out of them. I think building forts and tree houses is the best thing you can do for a kid and his friends. Pine cone battles are to be encouraged. Leave your kids alone in the woods! Preferably with a knife, thick string and a sandwich so they can make a weapon and not have to hunt on an empty stomach.
You may not agree with this, but no more helmets. Head injuries build character. OK, maybe not always, but my point is to encourage rough games. Dodge ball must regain its place on the schoolyard. Taking out your opponent with a mightily hurled air-filled plastic ball is a joyful, immediately satisfying action. It’s a male thing to do.
When I was in Afghanistan embedded with U.S. troops a few years ago, deep in Taliban country, I was eating my MRE in solitude by the combat outpost’s dump as a couple of hungry dogs kept me company. While I ate what the dogs didn’t want, I watched a gang of young Afghan boys run as a group in a lush green field some 80 yards away. Every few minutes one of them went down—hard. I looked for their ball. There wasn’t one. They were just running as a small herd, tripping over one another, getting up, running and returning the favor. Primitive, but they were having a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, their primitive fathers spent their days stymieing the most powerful military in the history of the universe.
We need Spartans, not cupcakes.
Awesome commentary!