The British TV series “Adolescence” touched something very deep in me, and, I think, shows something very deep in America, and the world. Rather than reveal anything about the story, I would like to write what it activated in me, and perhaps gives some understanding about America.
My father was the son of an Italian immigrant who was a coal miner in a small coal mining town in central Illinois. He was a violent, abusive Italian who would get drunk and beat his wife, and I suppose his children, including my father. When my father became old enough he intervened one night against his father and fought him. His father later died of either an accidental death or suicide, I don’t know which. Long before I was born.
My father swore he would never lay a hand on his wife when he became a man. And he never hit my mother. Good for him. He was many good things, and he was better than his father.
But he was a domineering macho Italian man with an explosive temper. And he did “spank” me and my sister. Like the boy in “Adolescence” I was not a hard boy, I was a soft boy, I drew, I read. My father tried to toughen me, but what he did was terrorize me. His father passed his pain on to my father who then passed his own pain on to me.
And I grew up, and was lucky to seek a spiritual path, and did the spiritual and personal growth worked needed to be a good, non violent man.
But still today I deal with sudden and inappropriate bursts of anger. A lifelong goal of mine is to be a peaceful, loving man. And I am. But I am disturbed by my sudden feelings of anger.
So my personal story is told in a metaphorical way in this remarkable TV series, “Adolescence “. No, my story doesn’t involve any murders. The deep impact to me of this show was a blinding truth - we see the anger and it is real and has an effect, but what is really there is the pain.
The story also reveals the terrible effect that the social media “manosphere” has on young boys trying to understand how to be a man. And they are told to be domineering, muscular, hard hearted, scary, cruel. And they don’t know different. So they try.
Another terrible thing to see is the deep humiliation and pain of being called, and being, an incel - an involuntarily celibate male, totally emasculated, humiliated, in pain, and angry. I remember that emasculating humiliation because I was an “incel” well into my twenties. I was just too awkward and shy.
I believe a lot of America’s MAGA political movement is based on men, and women, not knowing how to be a man. They have absorbed the idea of being a domineering, threatening, “muscular” chauvinist is the way to be a real man. They are just older adolescents who have not yet discovered what a man is.
They are wrong. If they would like a better model they could learn a lot by the life and teachings of Jesus, or Buddha. Any model of manhood that does not include empathy, compassion, integrity, responsibility, honor is a false model.
Our country and the world are in a deep spiritual crisis, one that sees cruelty as manliness and sees compassion as weakness. And we are all in a fundamental paradigm shift into a true masculinity, one of a balance of masculine doing and building in harmony with more feminine energies of feeling and caring. It’s a big shift. But I believe it is in process.
