I have set out to cross-fertilize, left and right, encouraging pro-immigration folks to talk to pro-life folks, and vice versa. Talk is a small step for man; listening is a large step for all mankind.
In the short run, that probably means I will bother friends on both sides. To build a bridge, you need a pile of bricks stacked up, available, on both sides. It’s a lot easier and arguably more fun to throw them at the other side than to build the bridge. That’s an occupational hazard of bridge-builders.
Another hazard is the temptation to pontificate. “Pontificate” is a Latin word, which means “to build (facere) a bridge (pons).” In English, it means to be pompous and verbose. Uh-oh.
Anyway, here’s a brick.
I don’t think that it makes sense to tinker with our understanding of marriage in the middle of an unresolved crisis involving 40 million (plus or minus) smashed families. That is, in the past 40 years, there have been about 60 million surgical abortions in the United States; some were repeats. One secondary facet of an abortion is that a man fails completely in his key role on earth: his own child gets killed. He fails abysmally because of a prior failure: he failed to ensure that a woman he loved (or screwed, anyway – if he didn’t love her, that’s another problem) trusted him. To protect his child, he has to make sure that the mom feels safe, secure, and hopeful. If she doesn’t trust him, the baby dies, and it’s largely his fault.
How to deal with this? Re-define baby. Re-define sex. Re-define family. Re-define marriage. Problems all solved. Be happy!
But then, we still have 40 million guys wandering around, feeling like worthless drones.
One of the puzzles in education today is a growing and unexplained achievement gap. Educators have been working hard to close the achievement gap between blacks and whites, between Latinos and whites – with some success. There remain some stubborn gender issues in employment gaps in the highest rungs of society: much angst and discussion remains, but there’s been much progress. Unresolved: few people have started thinking about the steady expansion in the numbers of rootless and hopeless white males – smart white guys with no ambition. A growing problem, approaching crisis – measured everywhere but not understood at all.
What did you say, you bleeping chauvinist pig? Did you say we have to preserve an uptight straight patriarchal hierarchy that subjugates women just to protect the tender bruised egos of rich fat white guys?
Not exactly, but …
Bricks in the air. Let’s pick this up later.