By Jim Hagarty
1988
Current popular wisdom says the world would be a better place if men would just learn how to cry. We bottle up too much inside and that’s why we’re so nuts.
Women cry, so they’re okay, but fathers still teach their sons to hold back the tears and so on we go, starting wars and screwing up the planet.
Society allows a man a tearful moment or two at the funerals of close relatives but that’s pretty well it for the public weeping a male can get away with. We can get choked up all we like and be unable to talk for a few seconds when called on to speak at weddings, retirements and going away parties but then we’re expected to pull ourselves together and carry on, bravely. Everybody, women included, gets nervous at the sight of a sobbing man.
Under the old system of raising children, men often taught boys not to cry when someone hurt them but to return the hurt double to whomever did the hurting. If any male was going to cry, it was always best to make sure the other guy was the one who did it. It was the law of the playground. Cry, and you became known as a crybaby, about the worst reputation a male kid could pick up in those days.
In the ’60s, we needed peace and love, in the ’70s, self-knowledge and small cars and now in the ’80s, what the world apparently could really use are more sensitive men. A glance through the daily stories in the newspaper soon shows what louts we’ve become and the situation is crying out, so to speak, for a tearful reaction from us all.
Some might say teaching men to cry could be as difficult as getting horses to moo, that it’s just not in our nature, but modern males are more adaptable than most people think. With training, we could move from whimpering and whining, to snivelling and sniffing and finally, to out-and-out bawling. Before long, a smiling, laughing man would be a rare sight.
Personally, I welcome the opportunity to start letting my real feelings show. However, being new at this crying thing, it may take me a while to know when it is appropriate to set the bottom lip to quivering, the eyelids to blinking and the boo to start hooing.
For example, would it be right for a man to cry at the following emotion-stirring situations?
- When Tweetie Bird drops an anvil on Sylvester The Cat’s head.
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When the banker starts laughing while reading your application for a loan.
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When you hit the funny bone in your elbow on the kitchen table.
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When you find an earwig in your hairbrush and two in your running shoe.
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When you visit a newborn baby in the hospital and realize his hair is already thicker than yours.
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When the country singer on the radio mourns, You Broke My Heart So Badly Darlin’ It’ll Take Ten Pacemakers To Get It Runnin’ Right Again.
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When you find your lost sunglasses one week after you bought a pair to replace them.
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When you hear on the morning news that the prescription drug you took for four months may be dangerous and will likely be banned.
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When three kids carrying skateboards walk across your newly-seeded lawn right after a rain.
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When you realize that with the ’60s music back on the radio, you’re going to have to listen all over again to the songs you hated from back then as well as the ones you liked.
(Note: I was going to add a line about, send your suggestions to blubberingidiot.com but then realized, no Internet in 1988 when this was written, at least not in my part of the world.)
