Safe places for women have never existed...without men

Like the Brown Shirts of pre-Nazi Germany, they march the streets to demonstrate solidarity against a demon of their own creation. Their words say, "We want safe streets," but their message makes monsters of men.

Men are violent, they say. Violent against women, violent against themselves. If only we can control male violence, our streets will be safe for women to walk alone at night, and the world will once more be a good place for women to love, nourish and create children. To create life.

But such a world has not existed. At least, it has never existed without men.

The sacrifices of men
For millennia, men lived, labored and died in service to one cause: to create a better life for their loved ones. Sometimes that meant war. More often it meant long hours of drudgery. Always it has meant sacrifice.

Let me tell you about such a sacrifice.

Years ago, my father joined the Navy. Hoping to be a doctor some day, he signed up for medical duty. After training, he shipped out to China. Tsing Tao.

He saw many things, in China. Bad things. But he saw good, too. And he loved the Chinese: Their culture, their art, their life. He spent many hours talking with the Rikshaw Boys, and made many friends. Many of them died when the Communists came, and when he returned home, he was determined to go to the University of Washington School of Medicine, become a surgeon, and one day return to China.

After he met my mother and they were married, he studied pre-med at St. Martin's, near Olympia, the capitol of Washington state, and then they moved to Seattle and he applied to enter medical school at the University of Washington, in Seattle. But then my mother got pregnant with me. So he quit school to pay for me.

For almost 40 years, he worked at Boeing. He earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Eventually, he did return to China, where he worked on a vertical tail fin project for Boeing while my mother taught English. But he never became a surgeon.

They left China just weeks before the Tienamen Square incident, and after almost 40 years, he retired from the job he took to pay for me.

As a youth, he saw many suffer in Tsing Tao, and he dreamed of becoming a great surgeon to help others as he had not been able to help them. But he chose drudgery over dreams, sacrificing his aspirations to support and nurture his family.

Civilization is built upon such sacrifices. Sacrifices our modern Brown Shirts take for granted.

Equal partners on the moral high ground
Forty years ago, such sacrifices were take for granted, too. Women expected it. But with the expectation went respect. If women made sacrifices, then so did men. If women were moral, then so were men, because men were acknowledged as equal partners on the moral high ground.

Yes, society did acknowledge the more insistent male libido, just as it acknowledged that women concerned themselves with things most men considered trivial. If either was considered a deficiency, society also acknowledged counterbalancing virtues. In a social arrangement where women and men had equivalent rights and responsibilities, this worked.

It worked so well that now a growing number of women and men are free to think beyond their gender to desire roles more suitable to their aspirations and abilities. If a woman aspires to be a doctor, she can be a doctor. Or, should her aptitudes warrant, she can become an engineer. In either case, there are fewer barriers to hinder her than confronted my father.

These opportunities were created by all the women and men who have gone before. Yet, for their proud sacrifices, our modern Brown Shirts condemn all men.

The Feminist Crime Syndicate peddles fear
Every May, New Rage women will gather on city streets everywhere to deal in the mind altering drug called fear. Banging their drums and cymbals, they march down streets chanting, "What do we want? Safe streets! When do we want them? Now!"

Men are generally not allowed to march with them. Men, after all, are the problem. Men are violent. Men victimize and rape women. Men are the enemy. Men are irredeemably guilty, just as the Jews were in Nazi Germany.

We are the sons of a noble heritage, and do not deserve this.

Our fathers and mothers shared the moral high ground, and their generation reached for the stars. Now, fear mongers demand that we hang our heads in shame, for in their presence we tread on sacred ground with boots oozing the muck of male immorality.

The worst of it is, millions believe.

Before too many more believe their message of fear and hate, we must respond. We must reclaim our right to share the moral high ground.

Perhaps the time has come for men to take to the streets with a message of their own: "Men unite! Take back the light!"

Regards

Rod Van Mechelen

Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.