The Rage of Young Men

My father was a legend. Not in the worldly national hero type, but a master of levity and intellect. He would and could disarm anyone with truth, repose and walking you through common sense. It wasn’t your truth, or your perception of it, but the truth in a biblical and communal way.

I miss that. This world needs that. Someone to speak truth in love and you be better for it.

I’m currently reading an autobiography and in it the writer alludes to a time as a young man he and his father took a road trip to see the Queen Mary—the very ship that took his father from its port of call into World War II.

The writer said that he was young and disrespectful to his father because he basically flipped off one of the seminal events of his father’s life. He, to this day deeply regrets it. He wishes he could have been the son his father so desperately needed on that day.

But that’s our truth, isn’t it? The rage of young men.

I was lucky. I got to take some of those journeys with my father. For me, albeit I didn’t know it then, he was preparing me for life as a man in America, and how to do it with dignity, purpose, and faith.

He walked me through why a beautiful 16-year-old African America waitress in deep-south Mississippi trembled and wept when she made a mistake and why the racist redneck customer turned beet red with rage.

He explained why when the race riots came to my hometown it was the ripple effect of politics and oppression and a little school in Topeka Kansas and a 7-year-old girl named?Linda Carol Brown.

He also walked my mother and I through the?USS Texas, a BB-35 New York-class Battleship?from stem to stern when it came to its final dock and destination in Houston circa 1972 to become America’s first floating Museum.

I can still remember the picture of my curly haired 18-year-old-father standing in front of the triple big gun turrets on his assigned Heavy Cruiser during WWII.

He taught me how to secure the rage and not succumb to it. He did that by never saying a word in reference to it, but as an example for it. He taught me that in the shadows of every man there was a darkness, a hurt, and in some a despair. That in circles of where we trod in our lifetime, whether it be with the power mongering and life destroying Harvey Weinstein type, or just the gas station guy named Bud at the Sunoco station there was line that as a man you never crossed.

“Hate will destroy you,” he said, and “Wherever love is, God is there also.”

Wisdom. He was telling me that you need to live life to gain wisdom. I used to say to my friends that he was so hip and so square at the same time. He used to say to me that you won’t know anything about anything (in life) until you are 30. For me, I think it was closer to 45 before I knew anything, period.

So why all of this and what does it have to do with young men’s rage? For that last decade and a half, I’ve had the honor of working with the homeless and jailed population in Louisville Metro/Southern Indiana. The one thing I see on the streets and in the jails is rage.

It’s these young men throwing life abating temper tantrums because they cannot rationalize why their fathers are/were absent? Then they take it out on their heroic mothers, sisters, and lovers in a life of crime, drugs, mental illness, alcoholism, and hate.

Satan’s greatest victory in America is the absence of fathers in our children’s lives. I can tell you that unequivocally as a believer, social justice advocate and citizen.

Do you want to know how to end crime, drug abuse, lack of mental illness wellness, alcoholism, and hate?

Become a?father.

To be continued…