A letter to the boys & young men of America, by Ishiro Finney.
A response to the mass shooting in Florida. The bodies aren’t even cold yet and already you are being blamed.
Yes you. All of you.
The boys and young men who will grow up to become one half of America’s future.
Once again, due to society’s failure to raise you, to teach you, to properly guide you on your path to manhood, your mere existence is being held responsible for seventeen more deaths….
The headlines of the last few days say it all:
“Guns don’t kill people; men and boys kill people, experts say”
-USA TODAY“Michael Ian Black reacts to Florida shooting: Boys are broken”
-New York Daily News“How Gun Violence And Toxic Masculinity Are Linked, In 8 Tweets”
-The Huffington Post“Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life”
-Salon“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
-The Boston Globe“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
-Harpers Bazaar“Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men”
-Politico …
Rather than take responsibility for the seeds we’ve sown, the culture we [or more precisely, the progressives] built, and the disaster you’ve been left to inherit, we as a nation have chosen to lie to ourselves. To listen and believe those who claim that the answer is simple: “Boys are simply born bad.”
As an aging Gen Xer watching this tragedy unfold, I can’t help but look back at my youth and realize we were the dry run for this “crisis of masculinity” as the media likes to call it. In my time I’ve watched as fathers were pushed out of the home, separated from their children, and their role in society debased and devalued. Like you, I was taught male behavior was bad behavior. That I was broken and needed to be fixed. Drugs, therapy, mass socialization were required to save me from my most innate instincts—
— the need to compete.
— the drive to create.
— the urge to protect.
— the desire for female affection.
Like you, I was told these instincts were not only wrong, but dangerous. That due to my Original Sin of being born a boy, I was destined to mature into a lustful monster and an oppressor of women. All this was burned into me before I even reached college, where campus policy actually assumed all men to be rapists waiting to happen. …
To quote Fight Club, “We’re a generation of men raised by women.” …
So here we are, coming close to fifty years of single mothers raising their boys as if they were animals. Two generations of young men raised to believe they’re broken, immoral, and dangerous. That their natural state, if left unchecked and unmedicated, is a sexual ticking time bomb of rape and abuse. Half a century of academia peddling a grim version of history that holds your gender personally responsible for all the wrongs ever to have happened in the world. And a press, that at this very moment, is blaming YOU for every school shooting to have ever occurred.
Read it all. Mass shootings didn’t used to happen before the 1960s, at which point progressives changed the culture.
