I am a link in a chain stretching back a thousand fathers and forward as many heirs.
In a recent post to my blog entry, To the EQUAL Women , a very intelligent woman you know as ShadowsAngel wrote: 100 years from now whether my life can be considered successful or not is going to hinge on how well I taught my children to be adults.
Angel's comment made me realize how many AMD readers entirely mistake my agenda to be constructed of praise to males and disparagement to females. "Equal Women," for instance is, merely, an argument within an argument as many of my blog entries are. I never seem to reach the summit of my viewpoint. Angel did. I'm going to try to amplify it here.
I hold fast to the position that the male brain is more effective in the negotiation of Man's affairs. I continue to believe his propensity to "mount"...to face challenges and conquer them, is indispensable to the equation which brought the planet into submission at his hand and I continue to be mortified by the suggestion that females come with the same instinct in equal proportion.
Far above that argument, however, there is a sublime dynamic which reduces the current affairs of Man to little more than trivia. On balance, there is little difference between the activity of a grown male during a typical day on the job and that of a small male child at play in a school yard. This is true even when the "grown male's" job is as a head of state, a general in a war or a captain of industry. Bob Dylan would have called the activity "blowin' in the wind."
Trying to convince my 27-year old son that the gathering of gold must become secondary to fatherhood in his life, I recently made the following argument: In order for you to exist, I told him, the decision to have a child must have been made by a million fathers before you. You are the most recent edition of yourself, I said. The greatest achievement you can ever know, the greatest contribution you can ever make is not the development of a fortune, the invention of a device or the discovery of a cure. It is the fatherhood of a child, so that you can earn your place as the father of the million heirs who will follow you. You are at best, I told him, a simple link in an everlasting chain stretching from the beginning of time to the precipice of eternity. To abandon the obligation to perpetuate your seed would be a presumption of self-value beyond the wildest dreams you will ever have. Nothing you will do in your life can possibly justify your value to humanity or your existence upon the earth in a way that will even compare to fatherhood.
Men are the architects of human progress. Women are the architects of life, itself.
If I seem in my blog entries at times mortified by the mindless propaganda that surrounds me and the self-serving arguments that drive commentary to my blog, it is because my job as a man is to reveal truth wherever my mind can locate it -- to play my part in the everlasting challenge to lift humanity out of a dark past where superstition and emotional need shaped his understanding and up to the clear thinking necessary to negotiate an uncertain future.
What occupies me most in the year 2007 is the hoax that has redirected the focus of women away from the single most important role in the drama of humanity and toward the ridiculous notion that squandering her life at play with the boys on the playground or the transitory machinations of the grown man's world is more important than fulfilling her responsibility as the vessel in which the future of Man is vested.
With attribution and thanks to ShadowsAngel
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| The REAL Master of the Universe |
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lillin
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Aug 14 @ 11:59AM
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rather verbose, but actually has some credibile points...
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nolimitholdum
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Aug 14 @ 12:06PM
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very well writen and through out history this has been repeted over and over with the same outcome. however, this is a path no one can change in our life time.
So just go with the flow, and hope for the best
good blog 
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ShadowsAngel
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Aug 14 @ 12:42PM
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You realize you *almost* did it... One of these days someone else will figure it out.... and then where ya gonna be?
You are correct... the collection of gold that we have when we are alive is less important than the people that we leave behind when we become dust in the wind. That is something that many people never come to realize.
In all of human history the most important things to have happened, absent our crawling out of the primordial sludge to start with, are things which ensure the survival of the species... Fire, the wheel... and yes, even SEX; or more specifically, procreation.
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Dominus
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Aug 14 @ 12:44PM
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Oh? And what of the likes of (to name a FEW):
Maria Sklodowska-Curie
Rosalind Franklin
Barbara Wanchisen
Lucy Brewer
Chien-Shiung Wu
Shirley Ann Jackson
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Hertha Sponer
Ellen Swallow Richards
Hypatia of Alexandria
Alessandra Giliani
Grace Hopper
Susan Greenfield
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Lise Meitner
Some, like Lucy Brewer, could be argued to be merely curiosities from a historical point of view (if you ignored her later sociological contribution), but others like Chen-Shiung Wu and Maria Goeppert-Mayer have been telling scientists without whose work the male “Architects of Human Progress” wouldn't have a leg to stand on. And you'll note that in this terse list I only included women whose work was thoroughly empirical, and whose contribution as the “architects of life” as you say was in philanthropy following their empirical success. Not counting the fact that many of them still found the time to raise families while they were carrying the world on their shoulders.
Now, in no way am I attempting to imply that women are better than men, or the converse. I feel that if anything, these indications merely point out that sexual separatism is just as wrong as any other form of separatism. That it breeds ignorance and antipathy, and that it keeps individuals from all walks of life from achieving their optimum potential. I feel it's more possible that as humans we have damaged ourselves by intoning that women (or men, for that matter) need to be pigeonholed and committed to one lifestyle or another. By not supporting both sexes equally.
There are some that might say: There are so few women who have been on those “lists of greatness”, that obviously men are superior and they need to be separated and elevated to give the world what it needs. But that reasoning is spurious at best and draws it's conclusions without examining contingencies, for it's much more likely that women have been kept “off” that list because of a du jure blacklisting.
I have yet for anyone to prove to me that “women” are any different from “men” save for biology and the fact that we force role models on people that don't need them.
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Dominus
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Aug 14 @ 12:47PM
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Oh, and by the way, don't you think it would have been better to "convince" your son of morals at an age earlier than 27? Behavioral experts recommend that starting before age 4 is imperative and that tends to last them through most of their life...so that you don't need to try and convince them twenty three years later.
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str8ngr84u2
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Aug 14 @ 2:19PM
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I may not be equal but yep, I am important to the existance of our species--notice I didn't say Man?? hehe
 Handsome! Good blog...
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NachoBaby
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Aug 14 @ 3:04PM
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That's interesting, I never saw your blogs as a way of disparaging one over the other, simply as a matter of asking serious questions and looking for a different type of answer than you might usually obtain.
Much like a discussion on 'fact' with a friend recently.
You may say the leaf is green.. but I might tell you that the leaf is a complex biochemical system that refracts every color of light but green. That it has a cardio vascular system much like our own minus the 'heart' (but then the thought crosses my mind that the tree or roots might be the heart in this equation) and that instead of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, it does the exact opposite.. and that we as oxygen breathing biochemical creations form a symbiotic relationship with the leaf. Which might mean that to us, the leaf is G_D.
Not looking to be patted on the head, I enjoy your discussions, whether I buy into everything you might be selling, that's a different story.
Oh and by the way.. Shadow's Angel.. is one smart cookie!
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swyeter
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Aug 14 @ 3:29PM
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Sadly the progeny of a million fathers before you can be wiped out in an instant when an only child dies childless. People today often spend too much time collecting and not enough living. You can spend your entire life collecting all the “gold” in the world only to have someone else spend it. I have never seen a U-Haul following a hearse to the grave site.
You cannot take “possessions” with you. So enjoy life while you can; remembering that the values instilled in our children are most often those they see reflected in us. The greatest “possession one will leave behind is the legacy they leave in their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children, ………………….
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Pudge2you
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Aug 16 @ 9:30AM
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This may sound a cut but it is not intended in that way, I have a question.
The super wide view you take, so long into the past, so long into the future... The advice given to your son, (I tend to agree with it, but...) has that long view driven you a bit mad? I mean is your desire to advise your son on the best contribution he can make (once again I agree that fatherhood is the best contribution...) tainted in some why by YOUR fear that if he does not continue the chain, YOUR contribution will be somehow diminished?
I just can't help but think you should be satisfied with your immediate segment of the chain in spite of the possibility it may be next to the last of a branch.
If all else is truly futile, how can you afford such a long view?
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