“You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.”
—Myrlie Evers, after the June 12, 1963 assassination of husband, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in Jackson, Mississippi. A half century ago, an assassin shot Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers in the back outside his Jackson home. This year marks the 50th anniversary of this senseless, tragic event.
“They take care of me as their own younger sister in life, but I wish to be their comrade-in-arms.”
—Wang Yaping (x), commenting on how she is treated by her fellow astronauts.Are We Not Men?
“We need to be more attentive to the needs of boys and young men. Our education system needs to stop treating boys as problems that must be medicated or punished into submission. Law enforcement needs to do all it can to help boys keep out of courts and out of the penal system. Otherwise, the imbalance will cripple our culture. Educational reforms like those that enabled girls and young women to get the upper hand now need to be tailored to enable young men. We have to nurture boys and young men as we have girls and young women.
Advocating for boys and men, however, is simply not done. The idea that men have untold societal advantages is so firmly ingrained in the American psyche that to suggest otherwise is seen as offensive. But the attack on men and the role we play in this culture is becoming destructive. In his beautiful essay “Why Fatherhood Matters,” Stephen Marche enumerates the ways in which the role of the father has been mocked and demeaned in recent decades, even as the role of the father becomes ever more important to the health of our society. This has to end. For the good of us all, it has to end.”
