Mission Field: The American Male

See update to this post at the end.

There have been some interesting discussions at Phil Wilson's blog post, Question of the Day: Moral v. Political.

In the context of these posts, I provide a disturbing passage I ran across this morning.

In a country in which 135,000 children take handguns to school each day, in which every fourteen hours a child under the age of five is murdered, and homicide has replaced automobile accidents as the leading cause of death in children under the age of one, few boys escape a firsthand acquaintance with active trauma. Once issues of race and class are considered, the picture grows even bleaker. There are more college-aged black men in prison than in school. And the leading cause of death in black men between eighteen and twenty-five--one young man in four--is murder. More than the childhood diseases we spend millions combating, more than accident or natural disaster, violence is the number one killer of boys and young men.
-- I Don't Want to Talk About It by Terrence Real; Ch. 5 "Perpetrating Masculinity", pg 113. Fireside 1997.

I do find it troublesome that while the so-called moral majority (an arrogant classification in my opinion), and the Christian right, spend much energy and resources fighting abortion and homosexuality, we are not vocal about epidemics that are killing our young men and women and contributing to the very problems we say we want to eradicate. Are we even aware of this epidemic?

I invite discussion from my readers.

Update: found this gem in the same book previously referenced.

Recent studies indicate that boys raised by women . . . do not suffer in their adjustment; they are not appreciably less "masculine"; they do not show signs of psychological impairment. What many boys without fathers inarguably do face is a precipitous drop in their socioeconomic status. When families dissolve, the average standard of living for mothers and children can fall as much as 60 percent, while that of the man usually rises. When we focus on the highly speculative psychological effects of fatherlessness we draw away from concrete political concerns, like the role of increased poverty.