What Does It Take a To Be a Man?

Perhaps you know

It’s not about becoming a hero; it’s about remaining a man.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CylP-jwVA68

Yes, this is the sappy version. Those who have had to face it can never talk about it. Not that there are no words, but because those who haven’t seen it, would only consider you a freak or a killer.

Still, I am saying that if you haven’t face death a thousand times and didn’t run away, you still have little further to go. No, that’s not even courage; it’s only the only way to be a man or, for that matter, a woman.

In my time, when two competing gangs wanted to recruit me, when I was 10, I refused. They beat me up every day until I was nearly out of my mind and was planning to kill at least some of them. If my parents hadn’t had a chance to move to a better part of town at that point, you wouldn’t be reading this and I would have grown up in juvie, where I don’t think I would have made it all the way trough. Still, what I’ve learnt is out there for you. Street fighting is bad, but it worse if you are unprepared:

https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/your-best-defense-are-you-ready-to

My next “step up” was in a factory job, where I was called the “grinder,” because I was the only one who had been trained in a number of jobs, which included a cylinder-grinding machine. I was nice to everyone, although I was able to do 200 pushups on the knuckles or on the fingertips or 200 sit-ups in two minutes. At one point, one of the nice colleagues came up to me and told me, “Grinder, you are a nice guy, but you are very stupid.” That made me understand that people there thought that me being nice was a sign of weakness or stupidity. Next time, when one of them was disrespectful, I comfortably chased him down the factory yard with a fake kick and a fake hit combined, and I didn’t have to hurt him, because he kept backing out. Nobody called me stupid after that and I was able to remain “nice.”

My final lesson was serving in the armed forces as a radio operator. By then, even the toughest didn’t challenge me, because “they saw it in my eyes.” Radio operators, for your information, lasted an average of 45 seconds in ‘Nam, but much later, when it was my time, I faced combat. Still, serving taught me about my weaknesses that I would not have ever realized otherwise.

Either way, I’ve faced death more times than I could ever count. I’m not proud of if, but I know what it takes. Does it make me into a man? I don’t know, but this is what I am. And no, I am not your hero; you can be a hero, if you choose to be, but don’t ever expect to be celebrated as such.

Most of the time, a hero doesn’t look like one.