Raised by Generations of Broken Fathers

We were raised by men that we couldn’t look up to

Modern men are taking the brunt of having a bad rap, we’re mostly suffering, I believe, from the sins of our baby boomer forefathers and in more ways than one. I was raised by these difficult and destructive men. Honestly, as a child, I was surrounded by assholes. Seriously, these men really seemed to have a stick up their asses. They never seemed to miss an opportunity to make life more miserable for their kids, especially their sons.

As best as I can tell… Baby boomer men collectively adopted beliefs and attitudes about how men were supposed to act and how fathers were supposed to be regarded. They believed that ‘father knew best’ and it’s possible that they knew these kinds of men or were potentially raised by some of them but something went wrong along the way. They may have known some good men but they definitely were not good men, they didn’t pass the tradition on.

The sickness of entitlement

Some experts in men’s psychology and men’s work would tell you that what went wrong is that fathers left the home to work in factories or corporate desk jobs. I also think it had a lot to do with them going to war and dying in war but more on that later.

“Boomer men didn’t know the difference between fear and respect. We feared them but we didn’t respect them”

For some reason, the male boomers became horribly misguided. They became entitled when entitlement is a disaster to the individual mind or a collective of individuals. They believed they were entitled to respect without having to earn it. They expected us kids to just respect them because of the position they were in and they were pissed when they didn’t get it when, again, they did almost nothing to earn it. When they didn’t get, they were just more angry and more unpredictable and they became more punitive. They believed that punishing children forced them to respect you because they didn’t understand the difference between fear and respect.

We also had to endure their narratives about how they were ‘real men’ and how ‘real men’ are the kinds of men that most of us are now reminded are equated to ‘toxic masculinity.’ The same labels that we men are continually pinned with though we rarely exhibit these behaviors. The boomers did it, not us but we still can’t shake the label. They were mean, rigid and even cruel and this is what we were told were the real men in society. It was destructive for us all and destructive for years to come. This is how ‘real men’ were portrayed. This was the broken archetype that we had to work with.

Instead of being positive and strong role models to us young Gen Xers, they were assholes. We couldn’t look up to them and we didn’t look up to them and it had partially to do with their sense of entitlement but as a male, it also had a lot to do with them always telling us to suck it up and all of that. They had no tolerance for perceived weakness. They didn’t guide us or teach us, they just yelled at us and punished us.

My father had this sense of male entitlement. He was a conspiracy theorist and a doomsday prepper before it was cool and he expected us to jump on board the crazy train no matter where he intended for it to take us without questioning or resisting him in any way. “You don’t support me!” He would often whine to my mom who would make a calm attempt to explain to him that this is just not how it works. But he did nothing to earn respect. He was childish, selfish and petulant. He left our family traumatized and impoverished in every sense of the word.

Positive male figures

I look back on my childhood and I realize that what I wanted and needed was a positive male figure that I could look up to and it was nowhere to be found. Every adult male that I knew who was in the boomer generation with maybe one or two rare exceptions was an asshole. They treated us kids and especially the boys like crap. They were just jerks, I had nobody to look up to and it seriously put me at a disadvantage in regards to having any sense of self-esteem. These guys were knocking us down every time they had a chance. I seriously struggle to think of a single man of the boomer generation that I even liked even just a little bit.

The consequences of their lousy parenting weren’t just felt by boys, I don’t want to make it sound that way. Girls suffered from it too. Every girl needs her dad to love her and look at her with adoration. She needs a father to be proud of her and the boomer men didn’t operate that way. They were never proud of us, they always found new ways to knock us down.

The first time that I had a positive adult male figure in my life I was about 16 years old and in retrospect, I realize that I looked up to this man because he was cool, he was relatable and he didn’t go out of his way to be a dick. He was only about ten years older than me, he was a fellow Gen Xer which is why he was pleasant and easy to deal with. The best part about him was that the archetype was shattered. Men didn’t have to be difficult and impossible. They weren’t all like that.

“They were never proud of us, they just looked for new ways to knock us down”

I can’t help but wonder if this is why modern men are going through such a slog. I really can’t help but wonder if we’re suffering from the sins of our fathers. Did the boomer men create an archetype of destructive males that we all remember? Is this why there is so much contempt for men and boys because the boomer men were impossibly difficult and destructive? Is it still trickling downhill even though large percentages of them are six feet in the ground?

What the hell happened?

I’ve found myself plagued with the mystery. Where did they go wrong? What happened to the good men and the respectable men? Why did they deteriorate into this generation of assholes? I wasn’t alive back then and I’ve often found myself wondering what went wrong and I’ve come to one major conclusion. War.

Before WW2 happened, WW1 was called “The Great War,” the world hadn’t seen anything like it. It was absolute hell on earth. Mechanized warfare and machine guns created a massacre. The United States incorporated the draft and 2.8 million American men went to Europe to fight in the war. If they lived they usually come back with an advanced stage of PTSD but back then they called it shell shock.

Barely 20 years later, the Germans started vacuuming up Europe and WW2 started. The draft was once again instated in the U.S. in 1940. Fewer men were drafted this time because of the number of them that jumped in line to sign up. They didn’t have to draft as many men because they were lining up to enlist. My father's father reportedly had his mom sign his papers so he could enlist before his 18th birthday.

The Korean conflict happened in the 50’s and the U.S. invaded Vietnam in the late 60’s claiming that the U.S. were somehow the victim in the situation and that the U.S. military was “protecting our freedom,” a lie they would continue to tell over and over again throughout the 20th. The draft was called again in 1969, my dad’s birthday was in the first two or three pulled. He was one of the first ones drafted but he didn’t go to war because he failed his physical. There was sugar in his urine, he was diabetic and didn’t know it.

Vietnam was a nightmare. We arguably had good reasons to be WW2 but we should never have been in Vietnam. We were the bad guys. Regular dudes were turned into rapists and murderers. When it ended they left death, destruction and women who were pregnant from being raped. They were doing the wrong thing and they knew it. They acted the part.

There was a brief invasion of Panama in 1989 where they were once again “protecting our freedom” by removing the evil tyrant Manuel Noriega and let’s not overlook the conflict in Somalia in 1992 that brought us the book and movie “Black Hawk Down” which was based on this disaster.

The first excursion in Iraq started in 1990. The U.S. military was, of course, protecting our freedom by invading Iraq and moving against the evil villainous Saddam Hussein. I’m sure there are many other conflicts in the 20th and a lot more democracy dropped on the heads of helpless civilians.

The 1900’s were a century of war and who fought in those wars? The men, of course. Our mothers stayed home, wondering each day if they would get some cordially written horseshit written by the government about how they regretfully needed to inform her that her son or her husband was now dead and if he didn’t die, he was going to come home exhausted and emaciated with that thousand-yard stare.

He’d wake up screaming or he’d have violent outbursts settled by bottles of whiskey. “What’s wrong?” She’d ask. “What happened while you were there?” But he’d never tell. He’d keep it to himself and randomly beat the shit out of her, the kids or possibly the family dog. The men were always sent off to war and never properly cared for. Their minds were torn apart and they passed that trauma down to their kids and especially their sons.

Generation after generation of men were traumatized and broken by wars that they didn’t choose. Unfortunately, they were conditioned to believe that war was a man’s identity and his purpose. They believed that real men picked up a gun and ran off to wherever they were pointed. The boomer generation of men sees it as an act of cowardice and weakness if you weren’t ready and willing to run off and just gun down whomever you were told to.

Killing people without question or pause is true cowardice and a failure of personal character.

And it was this indiscriminent murdering that boomer men saw as bravery and masculinity which is why they were the way that were and still often are. It’s sad, when you stop and think about it, that they were too weak and cowardly to even question things and that they just did what they were told.

Real men aren’t so easily ruled. They aren’t so weak and small-minded as this. They think for themselves and they value life but that’s a different topic for a different day. For now, I’m just trying to illustrate a point. We were raised by men who didn’t value life. They didn’t value us as kids, they saw us as their property but it went well beyond that, especially for us boys. As I look back at my childhood, I’m convinced that these men were traumatized and torn apart by the traditions of war. They were trying to toughen us boys up because they wanted us to be ready for the next one. They believed that the next draft was imminent and that they needed us to be ready for it. At least that’s what they believed.

The meat grinder

My childhood was a meat grinder. From our dangerous playground equipment to the bland gruel they would feed us, they were trying to toughen us up and get us ready for war, I’m sure of it. We had steel bars embedded into cement and gravel pits. At my elementary school, there weren’t one but two merry-go-rounds on the blacktop. Talk about a good way to thin the heard, that shit was fucking dangerous.

My junior high PE class was a watered-down boot camp. I’m serious. It was intense and unnecessarily harsh. They’d have us running in the freezing cold and doing pushups until our puny pubescent arms were giving out. To this day I still detest pushups and refuse to do them. They’d punish us with even more pushups if even one of us in the group did give out and hit the floor. You can’t make this shit up, I lived in dread of that PE class.

Par for the course, the PE teachers were complete assholes. They would humiliate us and punish us for minor infractions. It wasn’t just acceptable, it was considered to be a good thing. Thank God they had gotten rid of that stupid rope climbing bullshit by the time I hit that gym class. I have no doubt that schools got rid of them because of all the boys who were falling onto the hard gym floor and getting injured.

Helmet? What’s a helmet? Those were for pussies! Seriously though, we should probably be including conversations about head injuries and brain damage if we’re going to be talking about the boomer men. They were a generation of systemic brain damage. If they hadn’t suffered from a series of concussions they were definitely feeling the effects of widespread lead poisoning and let’s not forget the possibility of chronic generational fetal alcohol syndrome. The women back then couldn’t go to the doctor without him blowing the smooth smoke of their favorite camel cigarettes into their faces when they were pregnant.

It’s time for a new story

Men are failing badly these days but the worst of it is that we aren’t sympathetic to their struggle. When women struggle, it’s seen as brave and honorable because, well, it is honorable. But men aren’t afforded the same honor. They’re still getting told to suck it up and we need to stop acting like it’s just coming from men because it’s not. We hear this from women all the time, they don’t tolerate our struggle.

We were raised by generations of broken and traumatized fathers who had gotten this way from traditions of violence and war. They weren’t real men, far from it but regardless, they were the ones who raised us. They didn’t just buy into this bullshit notion that real men didn’t hesitate to pick up a gun and go to war but they bought into the bullshit American propaganda that it was patriotic and heroic to do so. They really believed they were the good guys and they really believed that the worst kinds of men like J. Edgar Hoover and honest Dick Nixon were good Americans.

I’m angry and resentful toward them but I’m also sad for them. They were fed lies about masculinity and patriotism and as a result, they were broken and torn apart by the trauma of war. They were done dirty.

I believe that a new day is here. We, as men, are ready to shake off the shackles of these broken men and these broken generations of masculinity. We’re lost as men and it’s time for a new story and a new identity. It’s time for us to question what we’re told and what we believe is true about men and about ourselves.

For every dude out there… my friends and brothers, it’s time for us to be better and do something better and choose to do something different. The biggest issue facing men today is a loss of identity both individually and collectively and we owe it to ourselves to rebuild that. It’s time for us to get to work and we need to start by ignoring almost anything and everything that we’ve heard about masculinity up until this point.

Masculinity isn’t evil and it’s not toxic. Men were the way they were because of the horrors of war. It’s time for us to write a new story.