Civilization is fathered into existence. If you want to destroy The West, destroy fatherhood. The rest will take care of itself – and the fathers will take care of themselves in due course, too.Photo by: Ann Wuyts
What happens when he realizes he can quit whenever he wants?
As it turns out, he eats a bullet.
This was big news last week, for about a minute-and-a-half, but in fact it is news to no one. If you haven’t noticed that you’re losing too many white middle-aged male friends and relatives to suicide, it could be you’re clueless enough to be an academic.
Consider this, from the linked article:
For Vancouver psychologist Dan Bilsker, what’s striking is how little we really understand about why the numbers peak when men are in their 50s. “It doesn’t fit previous models of things driving suicidal behaviour.”
In those models, by their 50s, men should “be feeling more in control of their lives, have worked out a lot of issues, be coping pretty well,” he says. After all, most of them are working, they’ve had jobs, relationships, children, life experiences. So the high suicide rate “raises a more disturbing model.”
Say what?!
Do you want to hear something interesting about poor dead Sisyphus, lying there in a puddle of his own brains? He left us because, from his point of view, he had nothing left to live for. Pretending that he was the dad in Father Knows Best in order to pretend not to understand his despair is simply to visit still further cruelties on the dead.
Why would Sisyphus quit, once he realizes he can? Duh…
Work hard, settle down, get married, build a home and a family – then have it all ripped away, all at once, with everything you’ve worked for destroyed and with what should have been lifelong storgic relationships torn asunder, never to be fully repaired.
Trade that treasured home for a cramped rental as you try to get by on what’s left of your income, after taxes and the ransom you pay in order to be denied access to your children.
Pursue any second chance at romance only among the rankest of skanks, real or virtual, with your only alternative being to roll the dice on yet another marriage and family, perchance to have that ripped away from you, too.
Persist amidst pandemic condemnation for being the real-life Original Sinner, the bloated white patriarchal plutocrat – living undercover, apparently, in a grimy studio apartment – who is solely responsible for every evil in the world.
And you only have to endure another thirty or forty years of this solitary ignominious poverty before you can die alone – unremembered, unmissed, unmourned.
Why would anyone ever want to check out on that?
Why are white middled-aged men dropping themselves like flies? The easy answer is hard to accept: Divorce culture. But the hard answer is even harder to take: Because the world told them they are pestilential vermin and they believed it. If house-flies cared about our opinion of them, they’d eat bullets, too.
Behold the power of bad ideas…
Civilization is fathered into existence. If you want to destroy The West, destroy fatherhood. The rest will take care of itself – and the dispossessed fathers will take care of themselves in due course, too.
What do you call a middle-aged white guy with a reason to live? Grandpa.
When you take away a man’s family, you take away his reason for being alive. It’s churlish of you to fault him for cleaning up your mess. And it’s absurd for you to expect him to hang in there anyway, working hard to feed a world that hates him.
Rest in peace, gents. You gave a lot more than anyone had a right to expect, and you got a lot less in return than you deserved. We’ll have sense enough to miss you on that very cold, very frightening day when we rediscover what fathers are for.
