I'm watching football right now, and the players are all accessorized in pink shoes, pink gloves, and silly pink ribbons on their jerseys. Apparently it's breast cancer awareness month, and the idea is that they are displaying their loyalty to women by reminding everyone that they (women) are particularly prone to getting cancer in their fluffy mounds of joy.
While I am a great fan of sweater kittens of all shapes and sizes, and I am definitely concerned about any ravaging disease that has the potential to remove them from this world, something seems odd about this to me. First of all, men wearing pink on Sunday afternoon while they violently throw each other to the ground is just plain silly. Secondly, I can't particularly envision a scenario in which women would wear a set of balls on their shirt to remind us that the same illness can befall men's most sacred of bits.
Where is our awareness of testicular cancer???
I make it a point to study our history, the World War II era being particularly fascinating to me. Stephen Ambrose and Studs Terkel both are famous authors on the subject, the reason being that they dive into the personal aspect of that time, interviewing and writing about the people that were cogs in America's war machine more so than the machine itself. What draws me to that particular point in history are stories told about the undying loyalty of man at the time. America was drawn reluctantly into a war that was designed to keep us on the sidelines, and (while in retrospect sending out boys across both oceans to die for countries that couldn't even help themselves was the noble and right thing to do) at the time American soldiers knew nothing of global politics or religious opression and genocide occuring in far off lands, these were citizen soliders. They were farmers, mechancis, garbage collectors; boys taken from their homes and sent far, far away, boys who proudly wore their country's flag on their coats and fought heroically for one reason alone - because they didn't want to let down the guy next to them.
That's why they fought, and that's why they died. They weren't putting their lives on the line to liberate France, or stop the Holocaust (although both of those things happened because of the American soldier); they were thrown into a conflict that they knew very little about and stood up from a foxhole amidst a barrage of gunfire because the guy in the foxhole next to them did. And they didn't want him to be alone.
There's no loyalty in the world at all any more, except in the global skirmishes that we continue to send out young men to fight in. Today, men not in military uniform will emasculate themselves by wearing pink to support the ladies in their lives who wouldn't do the same for them. Today, men like Brett Favre and Adam Vinatieri will switch teams and play for the enemy at the drop of a hat, all for a few more million dollars that they couldn't possibly spend in their lifetime. They let down the fans who pay their salaries, who are the equivalent of the men in the trenches next to them, and they do this without second thought.
Where are the men who would leave the small town that they grew up in and travel to distant lands in the face of the greatest fear they have ever know, and stand up and become reluctant heroes to protect the man next to them? What happened to the women who would stay home waiting for their return and then marry them and remain loyal and supportive to them for the next 6o years? Where are the men who would never dream of touching another man's woman even without knowing who he is?
What has happened to our society to bring us to a place where you can't trust anyone to be who they say they are, a place where you can't rely on the guy next to you to have your back in a bar fight, a place where you can almost always trust anyone involved in any aspect of your life to eventually let you down? Where is that place where people always do the right thing by other people, no matter how hard it is for them to do?
Apparently we left all that behind in our glory days, the days of our fathers, the days of a common and clearly defined enemy. It has become a struggle to be a man in this age. It has become difficult to believe in things like honesty, trust, love, and friendship.
I won't let anyone take that away from me. It is a lonely place to be, but I refuse to give in and give up my own honesty and loyalty to my fellow man just because he has forgotten about me. He may not deserve my loyalty because he may not be willing to do the same for me in return, but that's not going to make me change who I am, and what I believe in.
