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John DeVore’s tweet is meant as a joke, but it brings up some of the most important conversations we need to have in order to help prevent young men from becoming both perpetrators and victims of violence. After all, between the ages of 15-25, the second leading cause of death for young men is homicide. Even after that, until age 35, homicide is the third leading cause of death.
How have we failed our boys and young men?
What support systems need to be put in place to support young men in this country who are struggling?
What major changes do you believe need to happen to help reduce violence perpetrated by young men in their late teens and 20s?
How do we identify which young men are going to be perpetrators of mass events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown, Boston and others?
And ultimately, how do we talk honestly about the issue of male-perpetrated violence without casting masculinity as the cause? Because we know that the vast, vast majority of men are good citizens who are adding to the goodness of the world.
How do we address these as issues surrounding men, without casting all young men in the same light?
Hi Tom
Forgive my typos
Men’s paternity leave is 10-12 WEEKS and not months.
There are a lot of reasons this is happening and the reasons have been brought to light countless times but no one is really interested in the answers. What’s the saying??? Don’t ask if you don’t want the answer? Answers BY MEN have been given but ignored because they don’t fit what people want to believe. This has been discussed to nausea and it’s getting tiring. What it comes down to, as much as people want to believe society cares, they don’t. Nothing is changing and it’s getting worse. You want to know the truth? People can’t handle the truth.… Read more »
Hi Tom Brechlin
You write:
“Answers BY MEN have been given but ignored because they don’t fit what people want to believe.”
I am sorry that you have to repeat.
Can you give a link where I can read more about this?
You see I have not read or heard this answers by men,but I want to listen.
Article after article there have been countless responses about the state of men in today’s society. Repeated statistics, revised statistics, new statistics all leading toward the FACT that men have been lost in the feminist jungle. Fatherlessness, no goals. Helplessness as well as hopelessness. And I’m gonna say it and I give a rats ass what people think, we ARE a matriarchal society, When more then 50% of our kids are raised by women with little to no male roles models, what do ya think? What’s the problem? Turn on ANY news outlet and all you see are negative images… Read more »
Hi Tom Brechlin You say: ” The FACT that men have been lost in the feminist jungle. Fatherlessness, no goals. Helplessness as well as hopelessness. And I’m gonna say it and I give a rats ass what people think, we ARE a matriarchal society” Thank you for explaining. You write about America,and I don’t know what life is like there and how feminism dominate the American society. Since I do not live there I have not seen how ANY news outlet give negative images of men/boys. It sounds bad. I have read some of the articles that tells us that… Read more »
Hi Archy
Forgive all my typos.
You write well Archy,and here you are BRILLIANT!
Do you have your own blog online?
I promise to be a faithful folollower .
Sarah,
We don’t know, as in know for sure, what McVeigh’s motives really were. According to him it was the murder of fifty Americans at Waco and the resulting crickets from all of the Self-appointed Professionally Incredibly Wonderful (SPIW) who are forever going on about rights.
Someone give me a number. Tell me at what age a man becomes responsible for his own actions. Assign any number you want, I won’t argue with you, I won’t debate, I’ll just take it as the benchmark. It doesn’t even have to be an integer. It could be 7 times pi. It could be 15 times the square root of 3. If the older generation is responsible for the actions of the younger generation, then guess what? That means no one is ever responsible for anything, because the older generation was simply a product of their parents’ generation, which… Read more »
Hi
The photo illustrations here is of one the Tsamaer brothers.
They may be the guilty ones. it certainly looks like they are.
But there are no reason to think they did this because America treated them badly a young men.
It looks like they hate the American society and its foreign policy but for different reasons than how America treats its young men.
If this had happens in Europe the discussions online would focus on Islam,violence, radicalization of young men, hate teachings in the Quran schools….etc. There is a non stop debate about Islam in Europe.
Given the appalling actions of the U.S of A around the globe, I’m actually surprised this stuff doesn’t happen more. “Collateral Damage”, drone strikes, all that shit is great for creating people who hate your country. The problem is that the innocent civilians cop the harm with terrorism whereas the people involved in the actions that contribute to the death of somedudes/dudettes loved ones that causes them to hate the U.S are pretty much never ever harmed by these acts of revenge. Do counties that don’t invade others suffer common terrorist attacks?
archy.
So do the Christians of Egypt invade anybody? People in the Phillipines? Thailand? Any of them have anything to do with Israel or oil? How about Christians in Nigeria? Who have they invaded lately?
The Brits? Remember the subway bombing?
Many countries have a laundry list of shameful actions which provoke terrorism. The sad thing is the terrorism goes for the most effective target, civilians, who do not hold much power vs the governments to stop the invading force but are the ones harmed to send the message of the terrorists. I just find it sad that we have such horror still going on, I wish we as a people would move past it.
If you look at it anthropologically, every society has to come up with ways to channel young male energy in positive ways. In traditional cultures, young men spent most of their time with older men. Often there were lengthy, ritual processes for “becoming a man.” I recall reading once that young Masai men spend years living out in the pastures with the cattle, living apart, until they can be safely married off. In traditional cultures it is the family’s job to make sure young men follow the right life path through arranged marriages and so on. Our society has lost… Read more »
” AS A MALE YOU ARE WHAT YOU ACCOMPLISH “, even in this day & age, anybody who thinks that men don’t need to see themselves that way meaning what you have, what you did, what you doing, ..etc, by any means necessary, some of us (males) will try the peaceful, easy, legal, accepted,…etc ways, the difference is in the prospective of society about what is right & wrong , I personally believe we live here in the west in age of disillusionment for young males lately, which is building up to a point in the near future that would… Read more »
There is a saying I heard some time ago by a crown prosecutor here in Canada
“Men commit crimes and are blamed fully, Women commit crimes and are held responsible but are never blamed fully’
He was getting the the opinion that society and the law always look for a way to excuse the behaviour of women when they commit crimes. If you doubt it, look up Karla Homolka here in Canada.
I cannot figure out how this became about women committing crimes.
There is no way to argue that women commit mass murders at the same rate as men. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with men, it means there’s something wrong with society that is failing some men.
Joanna. This may seem far afield, but there’s Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement in the Hebrides. They built semi-buried structures out of stone slabs connected by passageways built out of stone slabs. They built huge tombs. Lot of work. IOW, they had a lot of economic surplus, which means time and the energy food provides the body. Doing pretty well, iow. What’s the big deal? According to the age of the skeletons in the tombs, they had high infant and child mortality, plus a lot of folks not making it much past twenty-five. Winter nights are long at that latitude… Read more »
Maybe it’s young women driving them to violence?! Dun dun dunnn (isn’t it fun blaming a gender). My guess is males are more likely to have the combination of genetics + abusive history (as a victim) to want to commit such violence? Also women are probably far more likely to plan out violence that is harder to be traced, and less likely to get them caught (drugging/poisoning, using hitmen, etc). Not to mention both genders HEAVILY bully men n women and the lasting effects can be as damaging as a missing limb (severe mental illness keeping someone trapped in their… Read more »
Thank you, Archy, for this comment.
No problems, just my educated guess after years of reading about this stuff and watching life first-hand. I call out the effects of bullying as the social anxiety disorder I got with the extremely depression severely harmed my life and left me in a house most of the time for a decade of my adult life, and whilst some of those who were cut by shrapnel suffered extremely bad damage I am sure some will have wounds that heal within months. Violence doesn’t have to be as extreme as explosions to make a massive impact on someones life. Each day… Read more »
Hi Archy
You write well Archy,and here you are BRILLIANT!
Do you have your own blog online?
I promose to me a fathful folollower .
No blog yet, I’ll let you know if I do make one. Not sure I want to do much more online commenting apart from the GMP, already spend enough time here:P
Johnathan G. I don’t imagine anybody who was unable to help those guys would be broadcasting his sense of failure. What would be the point? Secondly, the perceived need to help these kids doesn’t meant that they can be reached and helped. Even professional therapists can’t help everybody and the people they deal with are motivated enough to show up for weekly sessions for some time. Are not so nuts as to refuse therapy. These guys are a whole ‘nother level of nuts. The idea that these guys are what they were because they were “hurting” is not necessarily true.… Read more »
I completely agree with you that some people just can’t be helped, Richard, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But we can’t ever know who can’t be helped unless we try. Then, by trying to help and failing, we could discover who to watch. As for whether anybody who tried to help the young men who have ‘gone off’ in the past, well, the media has done a lot of digging into their histories in order to try to satisfy our collective desire to know why. The reporters would find out about people who got heavily involved to try… Read more »
Jonathan. I’ve tried to “help” various folks over the years. I went with another guy to do what might be called,decades later, an “intervention”. It was like shooting BBs at a bowling ball. There was always a rationalization. So I tried to help. Nothing helped, nothing changed, and the person’s trajectory went downhill. I never told anybody because it didn’t seem like a topic for conversation plus I have an affinity for not saying things regarding people anyway. And nobody ever was poking around asking. And if they had, I’d probably have kept quiet because a lot of stuff is… Read more »
Here’s the crux of the problem, as I see it: “We” as a society cannot act through our government and/or our civil society institutions partly for practical reasons and partly for ideological reasons. Practical: There are simply too many young men and not enough resources to keep tabs on all of them. Ideological: Tracking men closely enough to see how their lives are going and to understand their emotional state would require a level of invasive surveillance that’s against our nation’s principles, and would be ripe for massive abuse by unscrupulous totalitarian-minded government officials. So, practically speaking, if falls to… Read more »
Hi Jonathan G
You write:
“But men are disposable. Our society expects a man to succeed or fail on his own merit alone, and if a man does not succeed, we just cast him aside”
Maybe America needs to take a look at their ideology THE AMERICAN DREAM?
That’s kind of a rhetorical question, Iben, but one that’s worth talking about. The American Dream, as I understand it, is the notion that here in the U.S. we have a class-less society, that everybody has the opportunity to rise above the station of their birth based on their own efforts. The terrible flip-side of that coin is the notion that if anybody fails to rise in society, it’s their own fault. That judgment definitely falls a bit heavier on men, because of their traditional role as provider and protector.
Much of what younger people see and feel today are frustrations rubbed off on them from the older generation; hate, prejudice, recklessness and belligerence; the disrespect for rules and authority, intolerance and the tendency to resolve differences through violence; the desire for immediate gratification and more. This tells us we should be careful of what we project outwardly. Young people can and will absorb these things. The publication “RoadWindows” on NiLoPublishing.com offers some ideas on how to approach this subject.
Leslie T. Lox
Hi Joanna
I look forward to reading all the answers to your question.
And maybe someone here can tell us about what part the Internet plays. It is complicated,very complicated.
“How do we address these as issues surrounding men, without casting all young men in the same light?”
Violent and delinquent behaviour, even war in our closest relatives is linked to maternal neglect and abuse.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
but there are various taboos that stop us discussing or seeing how this applies to humans.