Manhood and Personal Responsibility
Young man, the theme here has to do with personal responsibility and the futility of blaming others for one's own malaise. Blame can easily degenerate and bring one to the mental state of helplessness. Adult men may fight, die or surrender to capture, but they will never accept the status of helpless “victim”even if such a resolve brings about their eminent death. Most men are arrested at an early adolescent stage. They play at life in a culture made for play.
I encounter this kind of male regularly in my professional and personal life. Advising them is like trying to advise emotional women. They lack the manly horsepower needed to make their life what they will. They have no shame in whining like women and are supported within a community of fellow sob sisters.. They blame Moe, Larry, Curley or the previous generation for their enfeebled condition. They never take personal responsibility.
A boy becomes a man when he decares himself full master of his circumstance. The Baby Boomers were sired by the Greatest Generation of men and women. Those men and women who came of age during the Great Depression and fought and won WW2. The boomers blamed all of their problems and all of the evils of the world, i.e. racism, sexism, fascism, communism, etc. on their parents. The depression era babies could have claimed likewise of the generation preceding theirs--but they didn't. How far back does it have to go before the blame buck stops?
My father was born in 1924 in Miami of Bahamian parentage. His parents moved back to the islands when he was about a year old and it was there he came of age. There weren’t many opportunities in Nassau for an 18 year old boy with a 5th grade education. All he had was good health and his American birthright. He returned to the states with 10 dollars in his pocket and a manly resolve to make something of himself. He was drafted into the Navy in 1943.
He was among the first contingent of black navy men drafted as seamen as opposed to being recruited for the menial service as cooks and stewards. He saw action in the South Pacific and the Philippians. It was in the Philippians that he took a piece of Japanese steel (shrapnel) in the chest. He hovered between life and death in a military hospital for over a year before recovering. He was 20 years old. Needless to say, my father went on to make a great life for himself and his Baby Boomer children.
He married my mother in the late forties and sired 4 children. I was his first born. He was a hard taskmaster and he did not spare the rod of correction. There were many times that I and my siblings hated that man. He was so mean! Even the neighborhood kids, particularly the neighborhood thugs, stepped lightly around him. Yet I never had any doubt that he loved us. I saw the man struggle day and night to put food on the table in those early and lean days of the fifties. Layoffs and racist hiring practices did not stop him from providing for his family. He knew how to hustle, whether it was hosting crap games or working with Uncle Lloyd at various handyman jobs. He took care of his family.
My father did not whine nor did he complain about the opportunities he lacked because of his parents flaws or the white mans racism. Tired of job layoffs, he used the G.I. Bill and enrolled in trade school to become an auto mechanic. After receiving his mechanics license he tested for a position as a mechanic servicing the fleet of U.S. Postal Service vehicles. This was 1957 and these positions were, by and large, reserved for white men. All applicants had to take a practical test, which consisted of reassembling a disassembled engine and getting it started.
Unbeknown to black men testing for this position, only white men were allowed to refer the service manual while reassembling an engine. Hence, very few black men were passing the test. My father took the test and failed at the point where, without a service manual, there was no way he could have known the correct firing order of the cylinders to reattach sparkplug wires from the distributor, on that particular engine (the mechanically inclined brethren know what Im talking about).
Undaunted, he got his hands on all the service manuals of the different vehicles used by the postal service and memorized the various specs that would be required to properly assemble any engine on which he would be tested. He passed the test the 2nd time around with flying colors.
Neither racism, nor what his parents did or didn’t do, could stop him. He went on to be promoted several times. He went from mechanic to foreman to supervisor and finally to manager of his particular vehicle maintenance facility. Along the way he earned his GED; though his job did not require it, he required it of himself. Today, at age 84 this tough old bird is still going strong. Even in retirement he is still the HBIC, the Head Buzzard In Charge and still bosses the other old buzzards around in his church and they obey. He has always been a natural leader.
I grew up observing, admiring and fearing this man. I also loved and was in awe of him. Like most men of his time he was good with his hands. He was a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a brick mason a tile layer, you name it, when shown once, he could do it. As soon as I was old enough to wield a hammer, I was allowed to help him with the endless number of building and remodeling projects he had going around the house.
My father sired four Baby Boomer children three sons and a daughter. We all made something of ourselves when most of our peers did not turn out so well. They made choices and so did we. Most of the boys I knew and grew up with are dead. Some died from drugs, some from street violence, some from suicide by cop, some while doing life sentences upstate and some from the ravages of wild living. Most of the few who are still standing are broken and silly men. Long gone are the cool and the swagger that used to characterize the silky moves of the boys from New York City. Hip city is hip no more.
Mr. Nats kids made other choices. This man with a fifth grade education produced three college graduates and one high school drop out. The drop out dropped out to go to work. My drop out brother was bringing home over $2100 a week as a 20 year old route salesman for Hostess Cakes. That was in 1971. Do the inflation math. He became self employed at age 24 and never looked back.
You who are of true Spartan spirits will resonate with what I have said. It takes considerable courage, character and intelligence to go against the grain of ones environment. A man must cultivate an ability to spot his own delusions and have the courage to root them out. Most men refuse to believe that they are mired in any form of self deception”and we all are, from one degree to another. If a man’s peers support his self delusion then he suffers a double whammy of deception.
Learn to think for yourself by first learning to know when you are not. This will take a man out of his psychological zone of comfort. Every man struggles with conscious and subconscious feelings of inadequacy. These feelings induce discomfort and it is natural for a man to avoid, repress, displace or attack the source of his discomfort or pain. When he avoids and represses his pain, he falls into a black hole of his own making. When he displaces his pain, he places the blame on forces and persons outside of himself. He gives up the power to upright himself and gives it to the imagined enemy. The great majority of men do this.
When you think for yourself, you no longer are able to rest in a psychological zone of dysfunctional comfort, which is like whacking off. It may feel good for a few seconds, but is ultimately frustrating, because there aint nothing like the real thing. If you recognize that your life is not the way you want it to be, then you must take responsibility for the way it is. Compel yourself to see your life as the summation of your free will acts and thoughts. When you are man enough to take full responsibility for every condition of your life, then you will be ready to attack the source of your discomfort and begin to develop and execute strategy and tactics to put your life aright--Only then can you call yourself a man.
You can only enlarge your power by enlarging your knowledge. You will not succeed at anywhere near your potential until you do enlarge your knowledge. When knowledge precedes experience and experience animates knowledge it becomes a self reinforcing system and the thing takes on a life of its own, but is fully governed by you. Applied knowledge over time becomes understanding and understanding leads to wisdom. Knowledge has allowed many a black man to transcend a lowley existence and soar to great heights. Think Malcolm. Think Martin. Think Dr. Benjamin Carson. Get knowledge. Get a book. Get rid of Colin!
