It is not a simple time to be a man. I think of the lives of men every time I go into the Stewart’s Convenience Store at the edge of town, a morning gathering place for the men who labor.
Labor is the only industry left in our town, especially for men.
All the factories and the good jobs fled long ago to China or Mexico. The towns up here are mostly hallowed out by trade agreements and Wal-Mart.
At sunrise, the pick-ups and battered and mud-spattered SUV’s line up in the parking lot, the men gather inside – the engines stay running if it’s below zero, an unspoken understanding. They sit in the hard orange plastic booths – Stewart’s wants them to be comfortable, but not too comfortable.
Carpenters and contractor and mechanics and stone masons and plough guys.
They laugh gossip, joke, rag on their rich and demanding customers, talk about their wives and kids, bitch about the economy, bitch about prices at Home Depot, wonder when the press will stop picking on the president, who they love dearly, even though they wish he would shut up on Twitter.
I call it Grunt and Grumble.
They are not big on Twitter, these men. Most of them can’t even imagine it.
I think there is a cloud of loneliness around these men, these morning coffee talks seem very important to them, the regulars come every morning, even in bitter weather. There is a camaraderie about the men in Stewart’s, they notice is somebody is missing, they help each other’s kids find work, they trade tips and leads on new work and on rich people looking for help, they go on about the weather, the new people, school taxes, the wives and what they spend, the second- homers for whom most of them work now.
They talk openly to one another in Stewart’s in the morning, but they will concede they hardly ever talk to men any other time, apart from the Super Bowl or big football games.
It’s the great irony of men in the country. They need the people who hire them, who have invaded the town and employ them, but who almost never socialize with them. There is not much love lost between the classes, between the outlanders and the locals.
I think man of these men are more at home at Stewart’s than any other place.
Women and many men are fed up with men these days. I guess I am. They seem to be hell-bent on wrecking the planet and the country.
There would be little violence without men, most of the jails would be empty. I read one feminist in the Washington Post saying, “do we really need men anymore, except for their sperm?”
Yet I know some of these men and like them very much. They have been very good to me, accepting and considerate and empathetic when I am in trouble. They have a strong sense of values. They love to help people in trouble, First Responding is a kind of faith up here. Nobody hesitates to come running when people are in trouble.
They work hard, care about their work, are honest and proud.
They seem lonely to me, and isolated. Things around them are changing faster than they can understand, or even react to. They are not sure of what is expected of them, of what is now permissible. They have strong values, some very much out of time, and out of favor.
They worry about their children and the kind of future they might have. They finally have a politician in power who speaks to them and know their minds, and everyone hates him.
I think they are afraid of women in many cases, they certainly know there is great change now, and more coming. But mostly, they are excluded from it. One men took his daughter and two friends to see “Captain Marvel” over the weekend. His daughter loved it, he told me.
But he felt the movie was not about him, and had nothing to do with him. He was excluded from it. “Couldn’t they have had a decent young man in there somewhere, just one man who wasn’t a jerk or a monster?”
He complained about this to his daughter.
Well, his daughter said to him, now you know how girls feel?
I think the men listening at the table really didn’t know what to say, whether to laugh or to cry.
If he had asked me about it – he didn’t – I would have said the way I look at it is just this: it’s their turn. It just is.
If we must “take turns” to move forward towards human equality, then OK, I guess, that is what will have to happen. To me, this is a step sideways, not forward. I would rather skip over that step completely, moving instead to a time when gender really does not matter, nor skin colour, nor religious belief — where the only thing that matters is our humanity.
I raised 2 children, a girl and a boy. As much as we were able, we tried to raise them without limiting their options based on gender. I would want the same for all the baby boys and girls born today. When I look at young people today, I see this kind of opening up is already happening, and this gives me hope.
I feel for the men you describe so well and the pain that this societal shift is causing them. I do not want them to step aside to let women take their turn. Couldn’t we instead find a way to move forward together, leaving neither men nor women behind?
God Bless Stewarts
A New York Company
We need women who embrace the feminine wisdom, not women trying to beat men at their own game. It is slow progress.
Someone in Ireland just told me how much everyone in Europe dislikes Trump and there is the sense US had it coming. I told her hang in there, we are going to elect a woman of color and there will be hope.
It would be nice to share but it just isn’t how it works yet, the pendulum has to swing back to the feminine (women used to run the planet long ago) and then hopefully to the middle ground. Millenial men give me hope
The much acclaimed movie “Roma”, has something in common with ‘Captain Marvel’.. in both, most of the male characters are portrayed as evil, ignorant oafs. Jon, your observation that the men at Stewarts are “hard-working, honest and proud” ….’they love to help people… , nobody hesitates to come running when people are in trouble” I assume this includes women. Your belief seems to be that women are, in general, saintly victims and men are “hell-bent on destroying the planet and the country”. (btw destroying the planet would include every county.) This childish and naive view is , I think, offensive to men in general.
Kenn, I never respond to people who tell me what my beliefs are rather than asking me. I’m happy with what I wrote and if you are offended, well, that’s life. I don’t argue my beliefs with strangers on social media. You can take them or leave them, your choice, Somebody is offended every day by everything I write. Suck it up, you’ll live. If I thought about that, I wouldn’t get up in the morning. In general, I’m not that fond of men as a species.
Jon, I was not at all telling you what “your beliefs are”…you make that very clear in your writings….simply pointing out how inconsistent you are in your writings. I am not surprised by your non- response response as your contradictions are patently indefensible in logic.
Ah, patently indefensible logic, well…humph…How come you are reading such dribble Kenn? I appreciate the good words. But isn’t patently indefensible logic inconsistent with being very clear? Or am I patently clear? My goal, I think, is to be clear, not for you to agree with me. Kenn, I thank you for being civil, and I would suggest my writing is, in fact, defensible. I just defended it on my blog.
Hmm, interesting. There were, not one, but two male characters that weren’t jerks in Captain Marvel: Agent Colson and Nick Fury. The super villain was technically neither male nor female, but portrayed throughout the movie as a female. But, I have seen all of the Marvel movies, so I already know Agent Colson and Fury as good guys the second I see them. Maybe this gentleman was not familiar with the characters.
I often hear men complaining about women action movie heroes, saying they are unrealistic. Well, yeah, of course they are, they are modern mythological beings. I hate to break it to them, but I have just as much chance of becoming Black Widow as they do becoming Batman.
Thanks Tami, good points, but I think the movie was very much about the strength of the main character, the director says this was the point of the movie. Agent Colson and Fury were not evil, but they were quite helpless and needed almost continuous rescuing, which was traditionally the role of women. This was a very different kind of Marvel movie, but you right, they were nice, but as I wrote,weak and ineffective.