Men to the streets
Today, the cattle have come home to roost. We have decided enough is enough. The camel’s back has finally broken.
Our sons have no jobs, and our fathers, our brothers have nothing to bring home at the end of the day when they are the providers. It is said a man is measured by what he brings to the table. A man was created as a provider. He needs to provide for his family to fulfill God’s ordained role.
How does he fulfill this role when opportunities are denied to him?
Our men have taken to the streets with a force that has not been seen in ages. They are matching stone for stone thrown at them, stone for teargas thrown at them. I would only call it a battle of wills, who is the strongest of them all. Is it Caeaser? Or is Man?
We have always measured our men’s pockets and for too long they have been empty. They are tired of not having anything to bring home to their families. Families are breaking because of a man’s inability to feed his family.
Our men are frustrated when they see the guzzlers coming in and out promising jobs but they are only left with empty talk to feed their families.
You cannot feed your family talk.
You cannot feed your family empty and broken promises.
You can also not feed them hope on empty stomachs.
Our men are full of promises of plenty, of the billion-dollar projects that will remove them from poverty, of the blessings and prayers that await them in the land of honey and milk.
Our men are dying, some are choosing to end it by taking lethal pills, others are taking the strongest rope they can find and hanging themselves off their ceiling while others who might be braver choose to jump from skyscrapers and others decide they shall chance to catch the stray bullet.
Others have chosen to go the silent route and allow depression and misery to carry them to the grave.
We are tired of watching the hopelessness, shame, and fear, and ridicule because of lack of bread.
Our men need their dignity back.
Look deeply within each person you encounter, no matter how brilliant or dull, refined or crude, righteous or wicked you judge this person to be.
ReplyDeleteBeyond their clothes, beyond their skin, beyond their behavior, beyond their words.
Beyond the emotions they show, the personality in which they dress, past whatever masks they don to conceal their inner woes.
Look deeply and see the vicious war each one fights inside, the battle to remain human in a maddening world—a world you will never know, for no two of us are placed in the same world and no two of us confront the same challenges—
—the sickness at knowing one’s own failures and deficiencies, the yearning to be more, the disappointment at not being that, the struggle to fight every sorrow, every pain, every plummeting, disastrous trauma of life…
True, perhaps not everyone fights every battle. Some have long surrendered.
But the very fact that this person was assigned this battle tells us more than can be spoken, for the One who created him knows he has the power to prevail and win.
That alone is enough to admire, and to be humbled, asking yourself, “Do I fight a battle nearly as fierce as the one I expect this person to win? In what way am I any better?”
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman