(credit: JGKlein, via Wikimedia Commons)
Eric
Van and His Lesson
A
harsh insight came to me a few years ago that weighed on my mind at the time.
It has come round again for a number of reasons, and it has to do with an
always timely topic, namely the relationships between men and women.
I
had a war veteran of about fifty-five tell me in 1975 what he believed was the most
dishonest thing about war movies. He was a colleague, a fellow teacher working
in the same school as I was, and also an honest and intelligent man. And he had
seen World War Two up close and personal.
He
had even briefly worked as a low-level agent in Germany because he had grown up
speaking German in his home and was very fluent in 1939. The British Secret
Service was searching the ranks in all the forces under British
command at that time for men and women exactly like him. He was pulled from the
regular forces, put into a total immersion program for six months, and then
parachuted into Germany. There he was left to work a simple labor job and watch one
particular highway for the next year or so. Once a week, he left coded messages
in a place in the bush about what kinds of traffic were passing down that
highway. He never knew who picked up the messages.
Then,
he was pulled. The Brits had seen evidence which told them that the Gestapo
knew something was up in that part of Germany. Eric was returned to the regular
Canadian Army ranks. He served honorably right through the war and in the
occupying force after. He left home in Canada as a young man in 1939 and
returned a very tired one in 1946.
The
point of the last couple of paragraphs is that Eric’s opinion weighed, and still weighs,
very heavily in my thinking. He’d seen a lot of the real thing. I was a young
guy who wanted to know the truth; he was an older man willing to tell it.
(young German soldiers, Norway, 1943)
(credit: Lyder Kvantoland, via Wikimedia Commons)
He
told me in 1975 that the thing war movies and books had never captured, as far
as he was concerned, was the loneliness of war. In the books and the movies,
the characters are always “buddies”. Pals. They are emotionally bonded and
devoted to each other. Whatever else is wrong with the war effort in their
sector or with war in general, they always have a few real friends.
For
Eric, this was just about the opposite of what really took place. Yes, you got
close to some of the guys you went through basic training with. Often closer
than brothers or father and son. But for those who got into real combat, then
came the crushing blow.
You
see when you really care about a buddy or a mate and he gets killed, it’s
emotionally overwhelming. Some men slipped into mental illnesses of one sort or
another after they lost a good buddy. And little wonder that they did. It is
just human to grieve for the death of someone we love.
Then?
Well, if you were one of the ones who’d survived that buddy’s death, you closed
yourself off. For many of these young men, unprepared for the trauma of such a
loss, that closing off was for the rest of their lives. They returned home
after the war to become, in the worst cases, brutish drunks, and in the cases
of the better-balanced men, what is called today “emotionally unavailable”. They
learned to live in the cliches of their society’s definition of a “normal”
life. Pretend to care about trailer hitches being attached to cars, vegetables “straight
from our own garden” tonight, and what was on television.
And
for many, it was enough. They were desperately grateful, after what they had
been through, to have a home. A wife. Kids. Grandkids. Golf. A decent job. They
had seen, felt, and done terrible things. Things that these air-headed,
laughing people had no conception of and didn’t ever need to learn of. For men
like Eric, unless you really pushed, and you clearly respected him as he really
was, he was not going to tell you anything real about war. It’s just too ugly.
But
my larger point today goes beyond decent old Eric.
You
see humans have been doing war every generation or so as if it is inevitable.
Every land, every era. We’ve just been fighting and fighting as whole nations
for so long that it has become part of who we are. I don’t think that the
situation is unfixable, but that is a post for another day.
For
today, suffice it to say that I think I have found an insight into why men and
women struggle to communicate the way that they do.
We
know that boys mostly learn to be men from the men in their lives that they are
most exposed to when they are still under seven years old. Their dads, uncles,
grandfathers, teachers, coaches, etc. We have mounds of research into this
matter. You are, if you are male, made up to a large degree of the traits that
were most evident in your dad.
When
we put that fact together with the one that Eric taught me, we crash into the
big insight: men are much more emotionally closed off than women because for so
many men, for so many generations, that’s what they saw. What they saw every
day when they were sweet, impressionable little boys.
What
scares me most today is that I fear the females that I know and the new ones
that I meet now and then are not just making little progress in teaching men to
be emotionally available. With the pressures for success and being a good mom
and the increasingly hectic pace of life today, men aren’t moving in the
feminine direction. In fact, women are becoming more “masculine” in the direst
way: they are growing more emotionally closed off.
There
are signs of hope. Many men today have really thought about this whole matter;
their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters have pushed them to think about
it. At least some of that awareness-raising was bound to take. There are
multiple movements in society today that, at least ostensibly, are trying to
ease this communication gap. For generations, the ache just festered; maybe
now, if we look at the problem honestly, we can begin to make progress.
But
I also see signs that the women are moving toward our side of the spectrum. Bad
signs. Smoking. Drinking. Drug abuse. Gambling. Overeating. They are all on the
rise among young females.
I
could go on, but enough. I’ve given you something to think about. And maybe,
just maybe, talk to your partner about.
In
the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a hopeful day.
(older man and woman)
(credit: FOTO: Fortepan, via Wikimedia Commons)
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