I have a friend with whom I gather once every 3-6 months to shatter wing-eating records. We did do our best recently. But the best part of it is the conversation. Since we don’t see each other regularly, we often spend 2-3 hours catching up. It’s always a pleasant experience, and we try to give our waitresses a reason to want us back.
We discuss politics, parenting, and religion; the kind that would get you in trouble in the Biden administration (you know, biblical stuff). But we are both in our 40’s and we have lost our sense of niceties choosing to be purposefully offensive to the powers that be. In the midst of our dialogue on Achille’s liberal tendencies, we talked about one of my favorite topics: how to raise boys to be men. To put it in very philosophical terms, how to raise boys to be what they were created to be.
Among the many excursions on the theme, we got into the real source of Achille’s demise–his cell phone use. A modern version of the story would have him weakening his powers every time he stared into the lights of his smartphone in public. Young men can’t carry a conversation well in large part because they have found how not to have a conversation–by looking down.
As we devoured our cajun pleasantries, our conversation centered around the things a young man ought to do in public in a smart-phone age, which leads me to the following scenario. Let’s assume that a young man came to my house to ask permission to court/date my daughter. And then let’s suppose that in the process of our conversation he pulled out his cell phone to check on his Snapchat. Then, let’s suppose that after I kicked him out of the house under threat of excommunication he called me later that night and said, “O, Reverend Brito, why dost thou kick me out from your abode?” I would gently tell him that for him to hold a chance to hold my daughter’s hands, he is first required to hold his eyes on mine and not on Sally3218 on Snapchat.
My friend told me that his boys are currently in college with smartphones, but that they stand out in any public setting because they are not glued to their devices as the other imbeciles. This means that these young men will have the eyes of the prettiest and godliest girls out there because godly women do not want men whose attention is divided. They want to marry men whose eyes are not easily distracted by the magic of the shining device. They want men who will look into their eyes.
The moral of the story is that if you want to raise boys to be men, you don’t give them smartphones as a reward. You train them to steward their eyes well first before the responsibilities of a machine that can get you to free porn in less than three seconds. I can almost guarantee you that however clever you think you are as a dad around your screen, your son is cleverer than you. He can probably figure out how to hack the local city council give or take a youtube video or two.
We will likely make many mistakes raising boys, but some can be easily avoided. Teach your boys to eat lots of chicken wings, and keep their eyes on the real prize by not exposing their heels to the enemy.
