"Even If...: Las Vegas to Lost Humanity" - Ukumbwa Sauti, WAC Team

Even if a rich, privileged European man hadn't walked unscathed into a posh Las Vegas hotel overlooking a music festival with 23 heavy firearms, shot and killed 59 people and injured over 500 people from a 32nd floor room window by premeditated, calculated violent ideation and action, the discussion and engagement of the fatal, emotional, psychic, anti-spiritual, anti-earth, anti-woman, anti-life, physical and political violence inherent in the modern and historical conception of masculinity and manhood, particularly also that in European masculinity and manhood, is a dynamic in immediate and emergent need of attention, interrogation and resolution.

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Even without the direct and deleterious actions of Stephen Paddock or Dylan Roofe or Timothy McVeigh or Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson or Colonel Chivington or General Custer or Stephen Collins or Jared Fogle or Brock Turner or Bill O'Reilly or Cardinal Bernard Law or Jayson Newlun or Pope Benedict XVI or Pope Alexander VI or Fr. John Geoghan or Pope Nicholas V or King Alfonso V or Criminal Columbus or Fr. Junipero Serra or Bishop Thomas O'Brien or Rev. F. David Broussard or Most Rev. Harry Flynn or Archbishop John Nienstedt or Auxiliary Bishop Lee Anthony Piché or Fr. Andrew White or US Army Officer Richard Henry Pratt or Augusto Pinochet or King Leopold or Cecil Rhodes or Daniel Francois Malan or F.W. DeKlerk or P.W. Botha or Ronald Reagan or Lyndon B. Johnson or Charles Manson or Cardinal Bernard Law or the Steubenville rapists or the gangs of European men who terrorized Africans  in Tulsa, Oklahoma or Rosewood or Charlottesville or who terrorized and murdered and raped Africans and indigenous women, people in every southern, northern, western or northern State of the United States of America or stolen country of Africa, South America, Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the Spanish Inquisitors or the perpetrators of the European Burning Times, we would probably still need to address, discuss, engage and resolve the violent thread of masculinity that has become the hallmark of modern manhood and how it is expressed, embodied, enculturated and projected into our present and future.

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Even without the constant rehashing, reforming, revalidating, retrenching of the faux-sacred and anti-culturally protected status of violence and misogyny and heterosexism and toxic masculinity inherent and lauded in video games and video gamers, in Return of Kings and Men's Rights Activist and pornographic and white supremacist websites, in christian biblical references, in the sermons from pulpits the world over, the sideshow exhortations of predatory christian televangelists, in 50 Shades of Grey, in World Wrestling Entertainment, in "That 70's Show", in every Elvis Presley and Frankie Avalon movie, in "The Godfather" series and just about every mob, gang, Goodfellas and Scarface film ever made, in every Pulp Fiction twisted teenage European man white-boy director got-no-chains-on-me-cuz-I'm-more-street-than-KRS-One-in-Harlem Django Unchained white privilege, total appropriation fantasy, in just about every single Hollywood and elsewhere western movie, tv show or cartoon that disrespected and distorted indigenous life and culture, erased Africanity and constantly diminished and degraded womanhood, men would be duty bound to interrogate our own presence in the world, dismantling male privilege in our families, in our jobs, our colonial and anti-colonial political parties, in our colonial organizations and structures, in our liberation movements, our cathedrals, mosques, synagogues, temples and urban and suburban and rural street corner and store-front Stockholm-syndrome-gospel churches, to consider and compassionately deal with how far and globally wide manspreading actually goes, to relearn the importance of the divine feminine inside all bodies and the earth Herself and if we are going to kill anything, we should cease being the "tyranny of evil men" and be killing patriarchy.

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Even and especially now, men have to find out, inquire and learn about what men are about.  this is and will be no small personal, local, regional, national and/or global task.  It is the one we must move forward into. Our lives and the quality of our lives and loves depend on it.

Postscript: If you are a man that is pretty completely ensconced in your toxic masculinity and male privilege, you will take this offering as a threat to you.  That is not completely true.  It is an attack, or better, a reconnaissance on the twisted part of us men (repeat - part of us) that festers in spite of all our claims of being good men.  Little of what I have written above is debatable, but it is definitely up for discussion and it is my distinct hope that men can stop being afraid...of becoming and being better men.