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I offer this in tribute to the men who have died in the male suicide epidemic that plagues our land. ...another unaddressed male health issue.
William Shakespeare is a man whose life has long since expired, but not so his work. While giving full credit to him as author and originator of Hamlet, among other great works, I take this opportunity to engage in an antithetical take on (primarily) his famous soliloquy (suicide speech), a bit of a twisting of that wit, as a testimony of my honor and respect for those men who could no longer “suffer the slings and arrows of their outrageous misfortunes” and proceeded to end their lives in the depths of their anguish. I have attempted to place in quotations my use and paraphrasing of Shakespeare’s original words. If my words seem heated or everwrought to you, then perhaps it is just the echo of their whispering, that has come to me in my dreams, and spoken softly saying, “live well for me.” Without further ado I bid you listen and ponder these somber thoughts.
“To be or not to be was not their question. It was nobler in their mind not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, but rather to try to take legal arms against their sea of troubles and by opposing them, end them. But alas, to die, to sleep was all they had, for by the sleep of death they ended the heart aches and the thousands of natural shocks that their flesh was heir to.” ...and so on and on this has became the consequence of a battered multitude of men in the hands of a corrupt system of law, that was, and is so heavily, unfairly prejudiced against men.
“To die to sleep was not a consummation that was devoutly wished,” by those poor souls who unfairly lost their sons and daughters, and reputations, and fortunes to those corrupt purveyors of law whose basis for action lay deep in radical feminist ideology.
In the end, the road that lay ahead for those doomed men lay steep, and the way too long and hard to climb. They merely sealed their fate against the thought that “any day above ground is a good day,” and hastened to their own end, to that untimely and tragic closing.
For these good souls “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow had crept in at its petty pace and reached the last syllable of their recorded lives,” and now they will weep and cry no more, forever. Their grievances lie silent in the unjust air of the sexist legal system as the restless ghost of justice denied to so many men prowls this earth, a mournful sight, and grows hungrier and hungrier with each passing slight, for a reckoning to end this ghastly plight.
I find it ironic that a man of the eloquence of W.S. should be so familiar and frustrated with the legal system of his time as to be prominently remembered in his vast body of works, for the quote, “First of all, we hang all the lawyers.” “Therein lies the rub.” Could injustice against men in his time, similarly, have been so unfair, that this most articulate Englishman could find no other expression to eloquently convey his meaning, than to utter those bitter words? I certainly do not advocate what his words are encouraging, because I personally am friends with several lawyers who are really decent people (believe it or not).
The need for a men’s commission to study the epidemic of suicide in males is desperately long overdue. In report after report on male suicide rates in America, that are abundantly available on the internet, the statistics say that, over the decades, the male suicide rate has been, and still is, increasing dramatically. This is not the case in the female population. Warren Farrell, Ph.D. writes, “As boys experience the pressures of the male role, their suicide rate goes from being equal to girls to being 600% as high as girls. By age 85, the suicide rate for men is 1350% higher than that for women of the same age group.” and, “in 1920, American men died one year sooner than women, today, men die seven years sooner.” In other western countries the news is equally shocking. In Australia men (separated) are doing so well in family court that they are killing themselves at a rate that is 18 times greater than that for separated women. ...18 TIMES! This has not happened in a vacuum, and a men’s commission is urgently needed to find and concretely document the causes so solutions can be expeditiously forthcoming. The mere facts: #1 that a commission for men does not already exist, #2 that these shocking statistics do, is overwhelming proof of the sexist legal system that is run amock in America today denying men just and fair treatment.
I would that it were not so, but that all men and women could live equally together in the light of the sun. Is that not the principal upon which America was founded? If so, why then has goodness conceded the dream, the equality, the justice, the freedom, and the truth, until goodness is nothing any man can find in any court of law or place of law today?
Has the legal system become so insane and prejudiced, that if our top judges were asked what they were reading, when they were reading the hallowed precepts of our constitution, they would reply callously like Hamlet, “words, words, words?” How truly patronizing it must be for judges to be encumbered with the burden of dealing with these lesser life forms (men), and how convenient for them when they just go away, but leave their money to be divided equally amongst the ruling elitist vultures who wait to pick over the financial scraps of their lives. FOR BATTERED MEN THE BATTERING NEVER ENDS. “The bad a man does lives after him. The good a man does is oft interred with his bones.” Even in their deaths the lies remain to plague their good names, while the ghost of their justice denied roams this world, trying to plague the souls of those who have none.
Thomas Jefferson wrote this in 1803 to the Choctaw nation: “Born in the same land, we ought to live as brothers, doing to each other all the good we can, and not listening to wicked men (women) who would endeavor to make us enemies.” What a magnanimously placating gesture of goodwill that appeared to be. Given the ultimate history of duplicity and hypocrisy towards Indian nations, a shameful legacy of our legal system, we ought not to be too surprised today to find a similar trail of ill gotten gains, leading from battered and cheated men, straight to the hands of the established legal system and its toadies. When this nation’s elected representatives dare to boast greatly about our great system of law and justice, then they surely are rationalizing a lot about the past, and not even seeing what men face today.
It appears that what Shakespeare said of the existence of men., “all our yesterdays light fools the way to dusty death,” bespoke a pathway, that has never been more heavily traveled upon by men then it is today. Lastly, I offer this quote from Shakespeare, as a valiant comrade might offer to his men, as he stands on the ramparts, looking toward a great battle, and facing certain doom, “Screw up your courage to the sticking point,” and fight on with me, because if your a man, your viable alternatives are really limited.
Sincerely, Ray
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