The worst of awful fates – the tornado leveled the town – is made benedic by men digging in to clean up and rebuild.
Spree killers, as we’ve discussed, are tragically underfathered, as are their all-too-bloody blood-brothers, Islamic homicide-bombers. In between are the ever-petulant grievanchists and the criminals who are licensed by them to prey upon them – thus to aggravate ever-newer grievances. Even weather news turns out to be a story of fathering, in the way that the affected populations prepare for and respond to storm damage.
What makes news news is maledy – things got worse – and what makes maledy maledy is the absence of masculine virtue. Benedy – things got better – can be driven by a woman or a child, but only by deploying a man’s way of thinking: “We’ll get the job done now and we’ll cry about it later.” The worst of awful fates – the tornado leveled the town – is made benedic by men digging in to clean up and rebuild.
We prize those men in those moments – when we need them to fight and die for us, to rescue us, to pay our way – and none of the rest of the time. This is a mistake in every way I can think about it, but this is the way that is most consequential: The men who bring the most maledy to the news – the men who shoot themselves and other people, the men who blow themselves up in crowds of innocents – are the same men who are most neglected, most marginalized, most disposable in our culture.
But every man in the modern West is disposable. We raise our sons to be our useful tools. When we have used them up, we throw them away. How foolish of us to behave this way. How horrifying for them that they know it.
Everyone swears he wants to change the world, but the world is a distant place, best influenced, apparently, by heartfelt sentiment. When it comes to actually doing something of moment in the world of real events, people can be too much absent. Yet here is something you can do right now to make the world a better place for one ordinary guy:
Acknowledge his humanity.
You have no idea what that guy is going through, but you know it’s more than you ever bothered to think about, before today. Let him know you know he’s there, that his contributions are important, that his life matters. You might be the lifeline that keeps an atrocity out of the news, the best kind of benedy – the already-good getting better still. But at a minimum, you’ll be living up to your own humanity, and that’s a benedy all by itself!
And so to church:
