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Bravo!
We used to have institutions for helping to civilize boys: scouts, team sports, churches, movies, fraternal organizations, academia, cultural role models, … The passage of time and the Leftists have eviscerated those. What to do? I like the idea of rekindling from the faith-based right.
Fathers who love their sons, and are there and involved in their lives; and those institutions you mention, rekindled from the faith based right, are the only natural forces that can channel a boy’s masculinity in a way that helps him to be a civilized and good man.
Your link to what psychology today has to say about the Promise Keepers really helps me understand what it is about this ad that so irritates me. First the left sells society ideas that greatly increase a problem. In this case, the ideas sold to us were the Sexual Revolution, diminished church involvement, Women’s Liberation, the benefits of easy “no fault” divorce and acceptance of an increased indulgence in substance abuse. These all had a part in bringing about the fatherless homes that made for more angry, hurt and confused sons acting out their alienation by abusing whatever power they had.
Then the left denies that there is a problem, and gets everyone else to deny it too. Hence the scorn and hostility directed by the left at the Promise Keepers. (I remember it.) Then Heffner escapes his self-made, animal-scat smelling prison of a mansion by croaking. Weinstein, and a number of the Weinstein types running on either current, are exposed; making the problem, the power abuse—but only the half of it for which men are responsible—impossible to continue to deny.
Then the left goes to work associating that power abuse solely with males and with the kind of male behavior that, for so long, prevented there being as much of it. This ad is a small example of that work. In it, fathers barbecuing for their families are made to look like the husband version of stupefied Stepford wives, and to sound like Druids getting ready for a human sacrifice. Smoke billows up from grills as these dads condone the Lord-of-the-Flies behavior we’re shown their sons demonstrating. They chant “boys will be boys” in unison while the mob chases a boy to be (we imagine) beaten up and humiliated, if not killed. (We’ve already been pre-conditioned by the Left, for years, to see this hunted child as gay or trans-gender.) This is followed by scenes of white men sexually intimidating women as the Left continues to tell us, from their illusory perch on the moral high ground, how opposed they are to this chimera they’ve created and want to sell to us as the explanation for an increase in boorish, savage and nihilistic behavior ( which, they’ve conditioned us to believe, has only increased in males, specifically white males.)—an increase that we aren’t to remember just happened to occur, of course, as the number of dads living with their children, never mind barbecuing for them, drastically dwindled under the influence, and implementation, of…..wait for it….bad ideas from the Left about the meaning and virtue of freedom. The Left tells us about “toxic masculinity”.