All the Other Things That Have Happened Lately

Sometimes the world spins too fast for a writer to keep up. Not that we have to have an opinion on everything, but we get overwhelmed and hardly have time to ponder the events of the day in a thoughtful manner. Take the government shutdown, that Gillette razor ad on television, and the death of Mary Oliver for example. Each deserves its own moment of silence, perhaps, before we open our mouths.

© Literary-arts.orgMary Oliver, 1935-2019

It is difficult to find anything good about the month-long shutdown of the federal government. After all, most of the meaningful aspects of government were profoundly compromised. Not that the executive and legislative branches aren't meaningful, but the services that affect us day-to-day, the ones we take for granted, were damaged severely. The one thing we can hope for is that we now have greater empathy for federal workers, many of whom are living just like us, paycheck to paycheck, putting up with constant customer complaints, and still doing their jobs to the best of their ability. They do their work regardless of which political party is in control of what, and face the same economic challenges the rest of us do. "Thank you" is what our collective response should be. Naturally, this scenario could be repeated in another three weeks if....Well, you can fill in your own narrative.

A television ad, presumably run on cable networks since many people only learned about it over social media, caused an uproar for suggesting that men who shave should think about policing each other in matters of bullying, sexual harassment, and other forms of "toxic masculinity." Complaints ran the gamut from assertions that Gillette charges women a higher price for "pink razors" to opposition to the idea that a corporation has any say-so in our personal behavior. The sheer diversity of opinions was staggering, but thought-provoking when expressed in a polite and thoughtful manner. If only the posts and comment threads on social media were more than mere rants. One of the overall undercurrents (yes, I love mixing metaphors) appears to be that men are uncomfortable yielding power to other men, women, pretty much anybody.

Men brought on this revolution themselves, it is safe to say, through their insistence on power as expressed through dominance, oppression, and rigidity of gender roles. Perhaps men fear either a future where they are treated the same way by women, or that "strength" will somehow be feminized and therefore weakened. Male power has been about an obsession with control and wealth, and protection of self above all else. My personal observation is that female power stems from a desire to protect others, that power is achieved through empathy and assertion, not dismissal and aggression. Sure, there are exceptions, but I believe I will personally prosper more under a feminine definition of power. Heck, even the men we hold up as heroes generally demonstrate a concern for others, sometimes sacrificing their own lives in the process.

The gender gap was brought to the fore in another event, the passing of poet Mary Oliver. It was embarrassing for me to admit I had never heard of her, or at least would not be able to name her as a fundamental figure in poetry, writing, and the environmental movement. Friends, most of them women, suggested it was no accident, that even among scholars there was a bias against women in literature and they took a back seat to their male counterparts. That is the real tragedy, that important voices are diminished when they are needed most. Oliver's voice is heard again now in the sense of epitaph, but I hope it echoes widely in the coming years and decades as we struggle with our collective sense of place in the natural world. May she rest in peace, as she has brought peace to others through her words.

What stands out to you in this schizophrenic beginning of 2019? Are you hopeful? Despondent? Share your thoughts in the comments, if you will. We all stand to be better informed by each other's observations, viewpoints, and experiences.

A Wedding, Wealth, and Masculinity

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It is perhaps tragically ironic that we have prom season and the royal wedding setting up the perfect storm of inevitable disappointment for the average high school male bent on wooing his dream girl. When you aspire to fantasy, have unrealistic expectations, and are more concerned with how you stack up to other male students, it is not going to end well for you. Meanwhile, women are collateral damage.

Our collective obsession with the royal nuptials Across the Pond is troubling if not disturbing. We revel in pomp and circumstance, and I dare say long for the rigidity in standards for what constitutes "marriage material" in stodgy old England. We want rules to be explicit, if only so we know when we are breaking them, but often because we have failed to properly construct our own moral compasses. We rely on externalities instead. America has few formalities, and even those may vary from state to state.

Consequently, our young men are left to their own devices, their own warped perceptions of idealism in the female form. How boys and men handle their romantic defeats is what should make you a gentleman or a loser. Here in the U.S., we do not learn how to deal with those perceived setbacks in any positive, meaningful way. At best our male students simply become more determined to achieve victory in the socio-romance game, and maybe set their sights on college coeds once they graduate high school. That simply perpetuates the cycle of reducing women to prizes to be won, by any means necessary.

The tragic part is that for men like this, women are a means to an end, the end being enhanced status for the guy. There truly is a trophy wife mentality whereby men measure each other by the....what, "hottness" of their spouse or girlfriend. Women cease to be anything more than an accessory to this kind of sorry excuse for a man. This is how we ruthlessly objectify women, and it does not even have anything to do with women. It is all about the male hierarchy.

At some point in our evolution did this become a strategy for becoming the alpha male? The accumulation of food and other necessary resources certainly made some males more desirable to females, but eventually there was enough to go around thanks to agriculture, improved weaponry for hunting, and the ability to preserve collected foods. What separates us now, then? We created the unnatural resource of money, currency that is not perishable, wealth that demonstrates you have risen above mere survival. We announce the existence of our fortunes through expensive automobiles, luxurious homes, second homes, yachts, jewelry, and other rare and precious commodities....and attractive, younger women.

Mating strategies in the animal kingdom are often complex, and none more so than in Homo sapiens. We point derisively to other cultures that rely on arranged marriages, that eliminate a woman's dignity through genital mutilation, or reduce her worth to her dowry, or enslave her in any number of ways by prohibiting her education and disallowing her consent to anything, but are we any better? American men who cannot achieve wealth, or cannot achieve it fast enough, try and bypass the implied route of success and just go for the hot chick. If he can get her, other men will assume he has something they do not. Women are the facade in the male social-success game. Debt is the facade we all use to project that we are wealthier than we are. We must stop kidding ourselves.

Let me repeat that: We must stop kidding ourselves. We must stop believing that we should be aspiring to great individual material wealth and the flimsy social status that comes with it. When we do that we start dropping pretense. We stop pretending. We start being comfortable with who we are. We start recognizing the matrix that is our unsustainable style of living and relating to each other. We stop shaming others. We stop feeling guilty for our excesses because we have realized the futility of indulging in them. We start having meaningful relationships with the opposite sex.

The revolution will be a long one. Men will not go quietly, willingly giving up the power that they have accumulated through greed and womanizing. We will have to overcome our biology and our social expectations, without the help of media and advertising that will even more stubbornly stick to the status quo, the old school rules of engagement. We have an opportunity here to advance civilization to a level of respect it has perhaps never enjoyed. Failure will mean its total collapse.

Man vs. Appliance

The other day my wife finished showering and informed me that the water heater must be malfunctioning and I would need to address the problem the next day while she was at work. This brought up all kinds of insecurities about my manhood and marital obligations, but I ultimately triumphed, thanks to the support of even more....women.

There it is, striking fear in the hearts of men!

There is an awful lot of truth behind that old adage that behind every good man is a good woman, and I might add "often several women." Siblings, other relatives, friends, social media acquaintances, they all can be encouraging in your time of need. I honestly had not anticipated the account of the water heater to take this direction, but it is absolutely where it should go, to the heart of human relationships, self-confidence, and lifelong learning.

Our first approach to the water heater problem was to solicit recommendations for a plumber via local Facebook friends. My plea was answered in part by female friends who advocated doing the repair ourselves. Ok, that would be me, then, while my spouse earns our household some income. I do not do well with the handyman thing, but in my defense I spent my teenage years without a father on a daily basis. My folks divorced when I was age eleven, and I saw my father every other weekend. He lived in apartments where repairs were done by contractors.

"Just look up how to repair a water heater on Youtube. You'll be fine" said a couple of handywomen on my "friends" list. They added that expiring heating elements were usually the source of the problem. My wife went about finding some videos and e-mailed links to two of them. I viewed them the next morning and while things always appear straightforward in those how-to short films, they *never* represent the exact model or circumstance that you will encounter with your own appliance. My nerves were still fraying.

As luck would have it, Heidi was carpooling to work this day, so I had our car at my disposal to fetch the necessary hardware and tools. Only problem was that I had not driven but once in roughly the last five months, so I was a little edgy about that prospect, too. I did find the courage to get behind the wheel, and was not as white-knuckled as I feared I would be. I even managed to find some helpful people at the hardware/lumberyard/garden supply/nursery store once I arrived. About forty minutes and forty-three dollars later, I had what I needed.

You have got to be kidding!

Our water heater is a short, squat cylinder located on a cement pad....in the crawlspace under our townhouse unit. You will notice that the panels I needed to access the heating elements are on the "dark side," not illuminated by the single bulb in the crawlspace. Also, the drain for the tank is about three inches from the floor of the crawlspace. I first attached a hose and ran it into a bucket, but the effectiveness of that strategy dried up quickly. So, I took to wedging another bucket under the spigot, filling it as far as I could without overflow, and dumping it into another bucket. About two hours or so later I decided I had probably drained the water heater pretty well.

Now to disarm this water-bomb

Note to self: Think you have drained the appliance below the level of the bottom element? You haven't. Black water blew out the opening once occupied by the withdrawn heating element. I quickly rammed the new one into the void. Success, with only mild, wet, annoyance. The upper element offered no such surprise, and the tank filled in next to no time. Heated water was available again in roughly two hours. Meanwhile, my body is still recovering from trip after trip lugging a bucket with at least four gallons of dirty water out of the crawlspace and into the parking lot to dump it. Drain, dump, repeat. Still, before I started, I had visions of Heidi finding my smoldering, electrocuted corpse under the house when she got home.

While I suspect that the true cost of this DIY exercise would have included renting a pump to properly drain the water heater, mission accomplished. Self-confidence was increased as well, though I still do not look forward to the next appliance breakdown. The real bottom line is the silver lining of learning, growing in "handymanship," and gratitude for friends who have confidence in you even if you lack it in yourself.

Toward Better Gender Relations

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I got up later than I wanted to this morning and so turned on CBS's Sunday Morning in the middle of Oprah Winfrey's discussion with an informal panel of other celebrity women talking about the "me, too" movement and related issues. Men seem to be taking a beating these days, but we tend to be dense, and it will take more blunt dialogue to get it through our thick skulls that we must modify not only our behavior towards women, but our entire mindset when it comes to gender relations reform.

Tracee Ellis Ross said something in that roundtable that really got my attention, but I fear it was lost on a lot of people listening. The crux of her comment was basically that men no longer get to define women, as individuals or a group, in any way. Men do not get to define a woman's mood ("Smile, smile!"), her purpose (catering to men?), and definitely not her place in society (quiet and demure).

We have, unwittingly, perhaps, treated women in the same manner that we have treated non-Caucasian races and ethnic groups. We have given them "permission" to fulfill certain roles and then become hostile when they resist or get "uppity" and create their own roles, the ones they truly desire and are usually the most qualified for. Blacks, for example, are embraced as long as they entertain us on the stage, screen, athletic field, court, or arena, or otherwise perform for us Whites. They cease to be human, but are products instead, though we would never frame it that way in polite conversation.

Women are right, the time for polite conversation is up. Time for some hard lessons. I know I could stand a vastly better education myself. Women are realizing they no longer have to answer to men, to be subservient, settle for less than they are worth, or settle for less than they are capable of achieving. They are not obliged to modify their bodies or emotions for the benefit of men. They have been tolerant to the point of boiling over. Many still struggle with conflicting emotions of assertiveness and "not wanting to rock the boat." That only points to how blessedly empathetic they are. God knows we could use more of that.

Women have allowed men to deny them not only opportunities for advancement in every conceivable context, but they have bent over backwards to please us. The karma chiropractor of the "me, too" movement has been long overdue. I find myself oddly relieved by it. Maybe I don't have to pretend to be macho anymore; but I also have to confront my own attitudes, impulses, and instincts and overcome them or refine them. The scientist in me understands that human beings are still animals, and we have a long history of "base" relations to the opposite gender. Those biological imperatives are not overcome overnight. However, that our species has advanced as far as it has in other aspects of the "logical" gives me hope that the "bio" will become less of a defining element in reaching a more equal and enduring pinnacle of social evolution.

So what if the "natural order" of things is toppled, or even turned on its head? It would be a small price to pay in the short run, with massive benefits in the long term. Gender relations as expressed in the "me, too" movement are very much akin to the civil rights movement. Indeed, emphasis should be on civility as extended to all human beings regardless of any other personal attributes.

Women have a dream for equality in every regard and they are entitled to it. To paraphrase the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., they long for the day when they, and their female descendants, will live in a nation where they will be judged not by the size of their booty, the content of their wardrobe closet, their decisions about childbirth, or whether they want to be housewives or entrepreneurs, but by the way they treat themselves and others in meaningful ways. Note the emphasis on intangible qualities, made evident through positive actions. The women I know already lead that kind of life of mutual respect and dignity and assertiveness. It is a model of true leadership that both women and men should strive to attain.