My Opinion: We Need to Toughen Up
Or Nothing Will Get Done
This was a hard article to write, and I’m sure it will be met with certain criticism and maybe some anger, and I accept that.
But in my opinion, it’s now or never.
We’ve reached kind of an odd pivotal point on our path to generational enlightenment. It comes down to the two-part question: do we concede when our feelings get hurt, or do we stand back up?
Let me start off by stating the obvious: being tough is not the same thing as being mean. It doesn’t mean to hurt someone else in order to prove your own “toughness.” All the same, being “a true man” does not mean to pretend that you have no feelings or to go to great lengths to hide your feelings. Human beings don’t have feelings or instincts just to suppress them in the hopes of acceptance by their peers.
To me, being “tough” means a lot of things, but for the purpose of this article I’ll focus just on one term that I have dubbed the best synonym: resilience, which a simple Google search for definition will bring up as defined as:
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness
The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity
What the hell happened to our resilience? I’m sure lots of people from my generation have heard the same speech from their own parents that I have from mine, and it probably sounds something like: “You guys have it so much easier than we did” or “you guys don’t know how good you have it” which then somehow leads to something like “your generation doesn’t know how to do anything.”
Maybe it is just me, or maybe being constantly berated by the former generation is a tradition that I will one day learn about when I criticize the generation of my own children. After all, life hazes everyone in different ways, unfortunately, and there is no getting around that. But after some serious thought, I have made a pact with myself and with God that somehow I will raise my future children to be tougher — more resilient — than I am right now. It was only two generations ago that my own grandfather was a child in war-torn Italy, sleeping in a house with Italian soil for a floor and eating food he found in the garbage to keep from starvation. In many places, quality of life has progressed beautifully, but our attitudes and our spirit have shaped quite differently.
I think about some of my ideas of real-world heroes: a soldier who gave his or her life for country, or a single mother working full-time and still being there for her kids day in and day out, or a random organ donor who stepped in to save someone’s life he or she may never meet, or maybe even the one classmate that decides at lunch to sit with the kid who everyone else just bullies… I know that my generation has that spirit within us, and I know that we are fully capable of changing the world every day like this. I truly believe that we are capable of a higher level of open-mindedness and self-mastery than anyone before us.
But sometimes, and especially lately, I think we’ve just chosen to ignore it.
I’m sure we’ve all watched old movies or read books from decades ago and thought to ourselves: “well, that would never pass today.” Why? Why not? And I’m obviously not referring to the blatant racism and sexism and the like that was accepted years and years ago that should clearly be omitted from modern media. I just don’t necessarily believe that creating a piece of art while letting the hand of fear that some people might take offense handle your brush strokes is good for anybody.
Someone will always be offended or disagree. It is their right, just as it is yours to make a statement.
One my my favorite stories of strength and courage tells of a World War Two hero named Desmond Doss, who in 1945 saved seventy-five men under gunfire from the Japanese at Okinawa. In a twelve-hour period, he lowered these men down to safety — some of them the very men who had constantly and severely chastised him in the barracks — all the while praying to God, asking that He help Desmond “get one more.”
I could go on and talk about other well-known heroes that have exhibited strength which has been since unparalleled: Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and so on.
The point is, that is resilience: just keep getting back up and walking forward. We need to be able to take punches, and know that we will return back to our feet. I think a lot of the younger folks of today, myself included, have just grown up in a world which has made us too afraid to fall. And believe me, I am one of the people that, in my own eyes, needs the most work in this particular category. I put myself in those positions, or in the positions of any of my own heroes, and I think to myself: I would fail if that was me.
But it’s now or never.
We need to start off small when rebuilding our spiritual strength. We need to tease each other! Cross the line! Say things that might push the envelope! The goal isn’t to be rude or offensive — it’s to get back in touch with the human loud mouth inside all of us that we can never erase, no matter how much we apologize for it or are told to ignore it. Just remember that whether or not you get back up is more important than how hard you fall.
We can’t live and die by our fears. We cannot let sensitivity, grief, or guilt determine who we are.
If we don’t learn to stand back up as a team and smile in the heat, and shake on it when it is all said and done, then in the end we will amount to nothing.
