Younger Anglo males have become a frequently sad spectacle in America.

There are constant print articles and television reports of their societal decline. As a group, they’re increasingly succumbing to drugs that numb the pain of being them, or, in extreme cases, suicide, to end the invented agony of being them. Whoever they are.

How did this come about? So what? Who cares?

These guys leading anguished lives or killing themselves slowly or quickly entered this world with one exclusive advantage – males sheathed in the right complexion. That leg up from birth meant they wouldn’t have to be any better than mediocre or at least half-assed functional to get ahead.

Unlike non-Anglo men and women, they could fail upwards. And have done so continuously until today.
Just gander at who’s soiling the Oval Office again. Can anyone imagine the same sort of specimen as Donald Trump degrading the presidency if he were black, brown, Asian, or a woman? Such people would rightly be judged as unqualified in the least, quite deficient at most. Those are candidates the electorate would’ve rightly rejected by acclamation.

But he speaks MAGA. Or he says what they think but are too timid to bleat. The short-fingered vulgarian incessantly belches the ignorance and intolerance which our society had been grudgingly leaving behind.

Read something recently from a right-wing tool who attacked diversity, equality, and inclusion. He actually twisted Martin Luther King’s “not judged by the color of [their] skins but content of [their] character” quote. Used it against what the statement intended. King spoke those words as a prod for the excluded of his time. The right-winger perverted the reverend’s meaning in order to bash, no, put back down into their places those who demonstrated the chops. Left to him the old order would’ve been retained and these worthies denied opportunities to shine. The right-winger preferred the previous era, when disincentivized layabouts with whom he shared plenty were unduly promoted.

DEI is just revitalization of affirmative action. Yes, I know reading that and the word “quotas” flops into tiny minds. Here is good as any time to remind that affirmative action simply vaulted habitually excluded yet capable, competent Americans into positions they proved themselves well suited to fill.

True. None of them were Anglos and not enough have been women. Think of it as raising a long-suppressed tide. But to a person the vast majority of them exhibited exceptionalism. They needed to have been sterling. There were and remain within our society sinister forces yet looking to cripple any non-Anglo male or female who falters in the least. They don’t get multiple chances to err or fail. Just once suffices. Only the privileged get mulligans in this life.

The segment of Americans historically who get that favorable lie when the ball vanishes in fescue is exclusionary. And given this advantage from birth an indecent portion will backslide when not mired.

Rather than remedy their “plight,” an ever-increasing portion of aimless Anglo males blame Boomers for their jam. Maybe because those who’ve followed us found carry-forward values in participation trophies.

Somehow the generation that endured Vietnam, discovered the premises fed them about the conflict untrue, righted the wrongs of a government which sacrificed men and women for greed and falsehoods, then understood that America was marbled with unfairness, inequality, and injustice and decided to make America live up to its much praised ideals by disrupting the status quo that kept inordinate numbers of citizens at disadvantages, somehow that generation thought by showing the way our successors would further the advance.

None of us conceived our inheritors would mostly be incapable of getting off their asses, on their feet then taking league steps forward. Who could’ve?

These days as Boomers cede prominence, who among us hadn’t heard some lament from a Generation Whatever about how “easy” our lives have been? How affordable life was for us. About the “riches” our parents bequeathed upon which we built upon.

Any Boomer worth his or her salt should be happy to tell whiners what’s been acquired and may be bequeathed only emerged from diligence, hard work, and refraining from distractions that could’ve detoured or derailed. Perhaps if they gaped less at handheld screens and playing video games and instead transfixed eyes on the prize …

Of course, revealing that plain fact to any member of our short-attention span/immediate gratification descendants might come across to them as twisty as solving the Riddles of the Sphinx.

Certainly, too few of us wander through life wondering about them though the answers are apparent in our daily lives. And these days, even fewer of us yank a tome from a library shelf to clear up these puzzles, leaving them to search engines to explain everything antiseptically.

But the feebleminded who’ve given themselves over completely to the “Manoverse” will seek out wretched pearls guised as knowledge from influencers posing as manly men; boorish blowhards who should be pinned under bright lights and loups rather than guilelessly emulated. Said diviners have hastened the deterioration of younger American men. The rancid sagacity they issue promotes outdated worldviews of the small reactionary authorities who jerk their strings from above.

Pummeled by halfwits through the ether, television, or social media malleable young nitwits below are further encouraged to believe society has cast them aside in favor of “the less deserving, the undeserving.” Through retrogressive imbecilic pronouncements, mentally void young Anglo manboys are stoked into rage. Then, once enflamed, they are directed to despise the same sort of expansive, tolerant, multisided understandings and acceptances that could possibly just as well rescue them.

Okay, maybe crack their minds open a bit. If they applied themselves. One step at a time … Baby steps at that. Fine. Let them crawl first.

Instead of exerting themselves towards discovery, the ripe for misguiding would seek out “wisdom” at their go-to fount, a bro. The kind of bro who has never questioned where he stood nor where his adoring lambs should stand beside him. On his right side. This bro, this man has become such a persuasive idol that no notion of introspection or contemplation deeper than shallow has yet stirred him. At least not over the air, before the cameras, or during social media sessions.

His from on high blunt phrases and forced ramrod posture do not soothe, do not comfort, but they do reassure in the least beneficial manner possible. Unmoored young American male Anglos can’t stand being confronted. Few have developed sufficiently to present valid responses. They who resort to laughing emojis as responsive crutches just want their most vacuous stances confirmed in the emptiest fashion available. Preferably through insistence, persistence, and short words.

Ever notice when an eminent “Mansosphere” bro is faced with a moment requiring real mental agility the process is so obviously taxing the knitting across his forehead reminds of cracking cement? Don’t get these guys in a situation where thoughts oppose. They’re likely to switch both trains onto the same track.

Hard to find any value in someone who either seeks to deceive or lead astray. But that’s how adrift young Anglo boymen have become.

Looking back at my own and my Boomer cohort’s passage from juveniles into early adulthood, it’s hard to imagine a “Manosphere,” much less willingly being erroneously swayed by knuckleheads labelled “bros.” Know who guided us through that passage? Our fathers.

They taught their boys right from wrong. Now, whether we absorbed the lessons and lived them afterwards is all on us. However, we knew the difference. Young men coming along today? Well, for them “right” and “wrong” can be elastic.

I tried envisioning how my father, how that era’s fathers, might’ve reacted had they discovered the dominant male figure we patterned ourselves after was a “bro.” Incredulous on the low end, outrage on high.

Surely my father would’ve been somewhere on the upper spectrum. Yet he might’ve expressed his disappointment in a wholly unexpected way. Thanks to being a firm proponent of dropping the hammer early, and father was a man who could hammer hard, he seldom needed applying it as I wended towards adulthood.

Father might’ve apologized. When he ever did, it must’ve been rare. While father had no problem admitting instances when he was wrong, apologizing just wasn’t in his makeup. Maybe not doing so protected him from becoming defensive.

See, he was born in 1918. He brought a lot of fixed beliefs into childrearing that today’s progeny might find, um, inflexible.

To his credit, though, when father erred, he owned up to the mistake. As I’ve come along in life, I’ve gathered the values inherent in that. One, such clears the air. Two, it deescalates then dispels the error. Three, it calms roiled waters.

Father might’ve apologized for having failed me so badly that I sought, no, took advice from such an empty and worthless pop culture creation as a “bro.” By failing me, he would’ve failed performing one of his most vital obligations That would’ve been doing his best to raise his son into manhood.

In that respect what father wants to admit he’d failed?

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