A Generation of Pussies

What is happening to the American male? When did they become such pussies? Being surrounded by fighters I seem to have missed the vaginalization of the American Man. I somehow thought that men still took risks. That we still endured hardships with stoic resolve. That we still faced challenges with courage. That we still took the roll of protector provider seriously. That we were still ...uh... Men. Yet somewhere along the way men in America have turned into video-game playing, internet addicted, drug using, unemployed mamma's boys who look for women to take care of them, who don't know how to protect, provide or even please the average woman. Not all men are like this but enough to give the rest of us a really bad name. How did this happen and how do we stop it? I blame it on how the past two generations have been raised and it is only getting worse.

Kids today are coddled way too much. They get "time outs" instead of spankings. Getting "grounded" means no Playstation for a week. They aren't allowed to leave their parent's sight. They aren't allowed to play sports unless they are armored with enough padding to allow them to safely fall off a thirty story building. And then the organized sports they do get involved in don't keep score so that there are no losers and no one gets their feelings hurt. Kids don't have chores like raking the leaves, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, pooper-scooping the yard, and washing the dinner dishes. Their chores are doing their homework and cleaning their own filthy rooms and sometimes not even that much. Teenagers don't get jobs anymore they expect their mommies and daddies to buy their designer do-hickeys. They may be the smartest generation yet, but they are the laziest and the weakest. They are less mature and more dependent than ever. They are emotional weaklings who panic at the thought of leaving the nest. I have heard it said that twenty-six is the new twenty-one. From what I have seen twenty-six is the new sixteen. And this cowardly immature generation of do-nothings are now having children and repeating the cycle all over again. Well, the women are having the children. Most of the men are off avoiding child support and trying to come up with some get-rich-quick scheme that will allow them to spend more time lying on the couch playing X-Box and less time working to support their families.

We are all to blame for this happening. Us and every idiot who ever wrote a self-help book. I've never been one for book burning but if we set every book written by guys like Dr. Phil to the torch that would certainly be a help. One generation of paranoid ineffectual parents turned to self-help books to get parenting advice and the world has never been the same. Now we are so terrified of emotionally scarring our kids that we overprotect them and turn them into the type of adults that fear just about everything that resembles a challenge, anything that might remotely be considered difficult. They all think they are going to be singers, pro-athletes, hip-hop stars, or the one criminal in a million who gets in and out of the game with millions in his pocket and his life intact.

The funny thing is that with all this ducking and dodging of responsibility, all of this looking for the easy way, they are actually making their lives more difficult. The men who are out there fathering baby after baby with many different women are fucking up their lives as much as they are fucking up the lives of those children and those wmen dumb enough to get involved with them. Those men who bounce from job to job living off women, their parents, the government, or hustlin' in the streets don't lead lives half as good as the men who work everyday to provide for their families. Their laziness damns them to lives of mediocrity. Their fear damns them. But this fear too is something we might be indoctrinating them too.

When I was a kid we played games like dodge ball and the ominously named "Kill The Man With The Ball" or "Smeer The Queer" depending on what neighborhood you were from. There was a game called "Suicide" that was a violent adaptation of handball or wall ball where if you missed the ball you had to run towards the wall as fast as you could and touch it before someone beaned you with the tennis ball. No one was ever seriously injured and we all had a great time. We played football on the street with no helmets or pads and there were lots of bruises and skinned knees and elbows but no broken bones, no one maimed or killed. Now they are trying to ban dodgeball from school because it is too dangerous. Too dangerous? These kids carry guns to school and dodgeball is too dangerous?

When I was a kid we fought. We fought almost everyday. We fought in the school yard. We fought after school. We fought on the street in our neighborhoods. We didn't shoot each other. We knuckled up and came from the shoulder not the pocket. WE took bruises to both our bodies and our egos but we got over it and moved on. Now a kid can be expelled from school for defending himself even if the other kid threw the first punch. Kids are so afraid of taking an ass-kicking that they'd rather pop a few rounds in you than take their lumps which I find ironic because they don't let you bring guns in jail but what they do have in there is a bunch of really big, really mean guys who do know how to fight. Brings to mind that old saying "Act like a pussy and you will get fucked." These cowards with the guns might be saving their asses from getting kicked but condemning them to punishment of a far more intrusive type. Better to take the ass-kicking in my book.

When I was a kid we rode bikes without helmets. We wanted to go outside and play rather than sit in the house watching TV or playing video games and we would roam the neighborhood playing until the sun set and the streetlights came on. We didn't have cell phones, pagers, and walkie talkies so that our parents could keep us under twenty-four hour surveillance. And some may say that times were different and there weren't as many child molesters and serial killers roaming the streets then but those people would be wrong. Violent crime has gone down since the seventies and eighties not increased. So why are we suddenly so damned paranoid? Don't blame it on a generation raised by single mothers because my Mom raised me by her self and so have generations and generations of Black women going all the way back to slavery when families were often sold away from each other. It's not that women are doing it alone it is that parents are just plain doing it wrong. They are afraid to obey their own common sense instincts and so they are raising young boys with no common sense. Young girls too, but it's the boys I'm most concerned with here.

When I was three and four years old we were left in the car all the time without airconditioning and we didn't die. We rolled the damn windows down. No one child proofed their homes. They let you burn your hand on the stove to teach you not to touch the damned thing again and if you broke something or touched something you weren't supposed to you got your ass whooped for it. We don't discipline our kids anymore or rather you don't. My kids get their asses whooped when they step out of line. That's why my son is on the honor roll, can cook and clean for himself, does mow the lawn and pooper-scoop and take out the trash (even if he does it at a maddeningly slow pace) and does clean the kitchen and wash the dishes after every meal even if he has to be reminded to do it. When he grows up he will not run from responsibility. He will not hide behind a gun when it comes time to stand up and fight like a man. He will not live like a parasite off the good-nature of some woman that loves him. He will be every bit the man his father is and much much more. He will not be some self-help guru's failed experiment like the kind of men that are now out there disappointing and ruining women for all other men. The kind of men who let their families starve because they are too lazy to get jobs. The kind of men who run from their responsibilities. He will be a real man in every sense of the word because I'll kick his god-damned ass if he's anything less. I ain't raising no generation of pussies.