A column entitled “Accepting responsibility” appeared in The Graham Star last week.
The column – after criticizing President Biden for blaming President Trump for the recent tragedy in Afghanistan – then goes on to blame Marxist-inspired feminism for the decline in masculine virtue.
Somehow, a great leap of faith was made that prohibition came about because women and children were left destitute by the crisis of manhood with drunken men not accepting their responsibility.
That logic is a lot to unpack.
Karl Marx had nothing to do with the rise of feminism. He was about class warfare, pitting capitalists against workers and the disparity of income that he saw 150 years ago and we see today. He predicted that if nothing was done to remedy the disparity, a revolution would occur. Czar Nicholas II certainly discovered that truth in 1917, long after Karl Marx died in 1883.
Accepting responsibility is not a gender-related virtue. It is a universal truth that the human mind – regardless of any physical body that encloses that mind – has something called self-determination. We all get to choose the right or wrong course of action and reap the benefit or suffer the consequences.
The column got me to thinking about gender roles in our modern society. The term “Barefoot and pregnant” was coined by a Kansas doctor Arthur Hertzler in the early 1900’s. He said that keeping women barefoot and pregnant would end divorces. Meanwhile, the divorce rate today is nearly 50 percent of marriages.
The truth is that a real man does not view a woman as a reproductive vehicle to perpetuate the species, or to maintain the household for which he provides financial needs. A real man looks upon his mate as a partner of equal dignity and rights in the lifelong quest to meet the challenges we all face in a modern world. There are also plenty of real men who don’t share the view in the “Accepting responsibility” column to play the dominus to their female relationships.
Real men realize that the term “real men” could just as well read “real women.” The gender is different, but the virtues are the same.
A real man does not blame others for their own weaknesses. A real man finds solutions. When you are done fixing the problem, you then determine causality to avoid repeating the mistakes.
A real man does not measure their power by the decibels of their muffler or the length of their barrels. A real man measures their power by the achievement of good for all members of their society.
A real man guides his life by a multiplicity of sources. The Golden Rule, Ten Commandments, Sermon on the Mount and the Bill of Rights come to mind.
The NRA, Q Anon and buffalo-horned Jake Angeli do not.
Roger Carlton writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, rcarlton57@hotmail.com.