Kindness is the new hero ...

If the world has to heal, there should be less space for the violence of our boys and men.The world has to develop genuine, natural and healthy outlets for the huge, physical energy that boys and men have. That energy has to be harnessed and channelized into productive measures and things.Then anger will reduce. We encourage anger and aggression by the games we allow our boys to play, by the violence they watch, by their behavior we overlook, by glorifying the wrong heroes and by encouraging bullies and war. We find anti-heroes cool, villains intriguing, dark as normal. At present, the world has more dark literature than it can handle. More porn, BDSM, sexual slavery, dominance than it should. We should stop glorifying violence.

There are two kinds of men who will need healing. Men with toxic masculinity who openly are misogynists and are proud to be bullies. Today many of them rule the world, and they have gained huge followers who are taking over our public discourse, spaces and freedom to be. They normalize what is not okay. So rapes become jokes, women issues become memes, sensitivity is scorned and discussion is considered sissy. The second kind is the superficially polite, metro-sexual male who conducts himself as a gentleman on the surface. He dresses right, has a good record at work, supports or exhibits normal acceptable behavior in social platforms but in private unleashes his loss of male power or sense of powerlessness on those close to them. This violence is huge and hidden and comes out only in spaces that the person chooses as safe and acceptable for his violence and where his violence has been safely and acceptably practiced for centuries.

The problem with our society is that we consider male violence as normal - in our homes, in our societies and in our countries. We rate men on their masculinity score on their ability to handle gore. blood at play, watching a gory movie or their ability to use violence as power. We rate men as loving when they persist with women past her consent. We rate a man's ability to love by the violence of his love and a woman by how much she is willing to put up for the man.We have created a society with perpetual male aggression and female submission. When women ask or find their power, it makes a man feel more dis-empowered and hence more purposeless and violent against women. It makes it easy then to see them as mere objects or as tools for his lease of violence. It becomes a power-game in which aggressors become victims.

How to stop this if you are a man? Question who your heroes are - real and imaginary. Analyze what draws you to them. Analyze what you consider as cool. Understand what you admire and support. Understand how your friends behave. Become more aware of how you behave - in public and private. Call yourself out. Call others out. Lose friends who are toxic. Understand why you admire friends or heroes who are toxic or if you are putting them on a pedestal get them down. Understand what you are creating and rejecting. Understand male privilege. Don't celebrate ass$%^&^. Develop a mindful awareness of this a day at a time. MAKE VIOLENCE UNCOOL. MAKE REPENTANCE REAL.Make up for this violence within you and outside of you either created by you or subconsciously supported or celebrated by you. If the journey to change is going to take a few centuries start walking in the right direction right now. Your one simple step could change your home, your children, your families, workplaces and communities. One action at a time. One day at a time. It requires real guts to do that.

If rapes have to stop, if wars have to stop, if bullying has to stop... violence has to stop and it begins with you.

If across the world men can stand and cheer for violence in all forms, they can stand against it. If the men heal, the women do. The children do. The women have a place to put their love and the children have the right looking up to. We have centuries of healing to do.

Does that mean women are not violent? Nope. They too contribute to the violence of the world, fighting hard from being battered by patriarchal systems, creating their own pockets of violence and hate in retaliation. But until we have a world that runs fully on matriarchy, enough to know it operates, we will never truly know if the violence that women can unleash on humankind matches the violence that men have so far. And, violent women are rarely role models for other women.

All we know is this. That in the same period that we have battled a global crisis, all the best answers have come from countries where women are leading. The most sensitive, balanced and compassionate answers and solutions have come from those places and countries. Not a single violent, bully male leader in this period has been an inspiring answer to what the world needs.

Violence is on its way out. It may take a while, and demand a heavy price before it dies, but it is on its way out. But the world has of late seen male leaders who are firm but kind, clear and compassionate, who are comfortable with the balance of their aggressive and gentle sides.

The world is readying itself for different kind of heroes who shun violence. They are the heroes the world needs. Just a different kind from what the world has always been used to.

The new heroes were earlier mocked as losers...

But, now their time has come ...

- SS [ The original note was written on 1/7/2018]