When I chose the tag #tonicmasculinity for this story, I was pleased with the wordplay in replacing “toxic” with “tonic,” and liked the implication of something restorative and rejuvenating. Today’s story fits that label better than most. This is Hasib. Hasib was my friend Stasa’s grandfather, a Muslim man who lived in what was then Yugoslavia. Describing him to me, Stasa wrote, “he passed away when I was six. I remember the last time I saw him he stopped by... Read more
I took this weekend away from the computer to breathe a bit, enjoy the nice weather and my family, and think about what I want my Four Weeks of Fine Men series to accomplish. It was an easy decision to start my series with my Opa Wynands and Opa Feddema, but maybe it was too easy. When we write of the dead, we have a certain freedom to fill in the blanks with our own projections, to embellish the good and... Read more
This is a guest post by Sheila Marie Connolly, who agreed to write about her grandfather as part of my Four Weeks of Fine Men series. Thank you, Sheila! This week, I saw a re-enactor pretending to be my grandpa. His plane was being installed in a new park, with a plaque describing him as “Lieutenant Colonel Colin A. Clarke, recipient of the Air Force Cross.” The re-enactor talked about the mission Grampy had flown, how he flew for nine... Read more
I saw an old friend this morning. I was out taking our dog for a morning romp in the dog park, and spotted my friend Derek walking past. After an exchange of greetings and a bit of catching up, he mentioned that he’s been following this blog series with interest. Was I interested in stories about personal growth, or do I intend to profile mainly men who are already basically saintly? If “toxic masculinity” is a toxin, a poison that... Read more
From a reader, I have this story of young men who are choosing inclusion and encouragement over exclusion and resentment, and blazing their own path towards a tonic masculinity. I chose this story to share because these young men superficially resemble some perpetrators of school violence: one is fatherless, the other is non-neurotypical, both have been victims of bullying and social shunning. However, as many have discovered before them, while you don’t get to choose how other people treat you, you... Read more
To continue yesterday’s post, let me introduce you to Gerald Wynands, my grandmother’s second husband. Gerald was a Dutch immigrant himself. By the time he met Anna, he’d already worked his way up from laboring on other people’s farms to investing, with a partner, in a farm of his own. Having got the new farm up and running to his satisfaction, Gerald left it in the capable hands of his business partner and took a trip to see more of... Read more
I’d like to kick off my four weeks of fine men by telling you all a bit about two men whose ordinary choices shaped the family and world I was born into. This is the story of the first of my two maternal grandfathers. This is my grandmother, Anna van Bakelen, and her first husband, Jan Feddema. While the setting for their romance may seem pretty dramatic to us–they fell in love and courted during the German occupation of the... Read more
With all the examples of toxic masculinity in the news, I feel the need for some antidotal anecdotes. It’s been gruelling. Last week, a young man went to his highschool in Texas and shot and killed the young woman who’d rejected his advances, as well as seven other students and two teachers. Last month, a troubled young man, a self-identified “incel,” drove a van through pedestrians along a mile stretch of a busy street in downtown Toronto motivated, apparently, by... Read more
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Matthew 6:31-32 In this week’s post for the Personalist Project, I wrote about the problem of “nice guys” who feel cheated because their “niceness” hasn’t brought them the... Read more
The basis of the idea of ethno-states is the assumption that coexistence and pluralism pose some sort of risk to culture. But culture is, of course, the one thing nobody CAN take from you because culture is the customs that arise as we live in communities. Culture is not static; it is the byproduct of living-with-one-another and changes as the individuals who make up a community change with each birth, death, marriage, move, season; each change in geography, political or... Read more
Peace and Pekoe
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