Tag: honor

Independence, Defiance, And Being Ready To Rock

Today is Independence Day, the day we celebrate the birth of our nation. I’d had another post planned for today, but bumped it because, well, I didn’t realize that Wednesday was July 4th. It’s an important day for any true-blooded American. It needs to be addressed.

Thinking about Independence Day, I couldn’t help but think about so many of those who fought to break free of the oppression they saw coming from the British Crown. Men who stood against aggression from not just hostile natives but a malevolent government.

There’s a lot to respect there.

Now, let me get started by saying that if you start with the whole “they stole land from those natives” crap and decide to bash those men, don’t expect your comments to see the light of day. While that’s a topic that gets debated regularly, I’m not interested in debating it here. Understood?

Now, with that out of the way, let’s look at what those men were like and what we can learn from them. Continue reading “Independence, Defiance, And Being Ready To Rock”

Honor and Duty

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about resurrecting honor.  Unlike most posts here, this one took off and blew up thanks to a link  from Instapundit.  It also spawned some interesting discussions on Facebook.  Since that first post was never intended to be all encompassing–it’s not a subject you can write about in a thousand words and call it done–it may be worth a second look at honor based on those discussions.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army
Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army

You see, several people argued that honor is intimately tied to the idea of duty.  They have a point.

Honor is, in part, based on how one performs his duty.  It doesn’t matter what that duty is, what matters is how you perform it.  The janitor who takes care in cleaning the building has infinitely more honor than the CEO who just uses his job for the perks while he’s running the company into the ground. Continue reading “Honor and Duty”

Resurrecting Honor

Once upon a time, honor mattered.  It was universal and vital for men to maintain their honor.  People were actually killed in an effort to defend it…though it’s not all bad.  Some killed by men defending their honor got hit musicals made about them, so there was an upside apparently.

Photo by torbakhopper
Photo by torbakhopper

Today, honor is just one of those things people don’t think much about.  A handful of people still do, but society as a whole seem to think of honor as a quaint relic of a bygone era.

Once people stopped holding their honor as sacred, the world began a nasty descent into what it has become today.  Men and women both view relationships, even marriage, as temporary arrangements and get married only for tax benefits or to be on one another’s insurance, nothing more.  So-called “protestors” initiate violence regularly.  Alleged leaders defend a would-be killer and excoriate the police officer who ended the threat.

Honor, for most people, is a thing of the past.

However, if enough people resurrect honor as an important thing, we can change that.  We can make honor matter again. Continue reading “Resurrecting Honor”

What Is A Man?

The idea of who is and isn’t a man may well be one of the greatest challenges facing the males of the human species.  These days, real men can be anything.  A real man supposedly cries at kitten videos and is a kind, gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly or something.

Photo courtesy of andriuXphoto
Photo courtesy of andriuXphoto

Oddly enough, traditionally masculine activities are often portrayed as being the purview of guys who aren’t real men but want to pretend.  Hunting, shooting, fighting, etc are all constantly being described as the playground of either those trying to overcompensate for something or as having some kind of homoerotic subtext that no one actually involved in the activity can sense.

The reality is that being a man isn’t as simple as society as a whole would have you believe. Continue reading “What Is A Man?”