“Compromising your standards, doesn’t mean you must compromise your principles,” is something I’ve grown to accept.
“Me-tooism” and the flagrantly misogynistic tendencies in our society has allowed us to forget the decency we were taught as men. Men who would get up and let a lady sit down; open a door or step aside or take our hats off when we entered a room. Society has swept these men aside and looked upon them as being out-of-step, old fashioned and relics. Well as a member of that group, I say there is nothing wrong with being old fashioned and just because someone wants you to compromise your standards, doesn’t mean you have to forget the principles you were taught. One of those would be being a gentleman.
Statistics show more people are living together than ever before and marriages are being replaced by this phenomena. But the statistics also say children raised in two parent homes have a better chance of succeeding in school, principally because two-parent household have a higher income. Note! I didn’t say dual-income families, I specifically asserted two-parent households.
I’m an educator and a father advocate. I’ve heard a multitude of stories about the systemic effect of absent fathers. David Blankenhorn talked about this in 1994 bookFatherless America, and still it would seem we have learned nothing. We have elected four presidents; modified how we viewed many things but maintained a view of how things should be. Our principles were much like those of former Secretary of Education, William Bennett discussed in his Book of Virtues.
But somewhere along the way, we forgot to get up to let women take our chair. We forgot to open doors for ladies. We forgot to take our hats of in respect and walk beside women as equals. The battle that ensued had women clawing their way through a bullying society that forgot to teach simple manners. We ignore with an embarrassing passivity leaders in our country who would rather brag about sexual conquests than being a model for the next generation.
And those of us who have subscribed to this behavior should be ashamed. No one is holding a gun to our head as we ignore the simple etiquette we were taught at home. No one is holding a gun to our head as we allow ourselves to be encumbered by habits we know are wrong simply because we see other men doing them.
I’ve often stated that the principal thing with the women’s movement was the absence of a parallel men’s movement to accompany it. As women received their own validation and a new self-awareness as they progressed up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, men were still waiting for the Pavlovian test result to release them from the antiquated heritage of their fathers. It was as if we were in a time warp and many of us have not realized it’s time to step up and assert the reality that a lot of us share the same foibles of knowing we are not alone.
There is a “you-tooism” that should accompany the women’s me-tooism that generates a collective responsibility where we are in this labyrinth with others and unless we help each other we will never get out of it.
So what to do?
Movement is good. Once we realize this is probably something we can’t fix, we will create a new reality that requires us to be intentional about growth. Once we own this new awareness and deliberately choose to grow, our owning validates us again. We can feel rescued. We can start being the men we were meant to be: opening door; taking off our hats and standing up.
Misery may love company, but when we realize we can do this…move together not individually up the hierarchy rather than become self-actualized, we will be equipped to show our children we are the fathers we were meant to be and they should be. It is our “collective responsibility” to do this. We are going to “kick it, till we kick it!”
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