My son is home ill this morning, and is watching the third movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. He’s near the end now, and Faramir is returning to Minas Tirith to tell his father the outer strongholds have fallen. The movie has just spent a few long moments on the gruesome battle between the Auks (monsters) and the men. It is dark and violent and the sounds are wince-inducing. It occurs to me that my sons have testosterone coursing through their veins and are programmed, evolutionarily, for battle like this. Men are supposed to be the dragon-slayers, the fighters, the brave, the hearth-protectors as women are the hearth-keepers. (Please don’t accuse me of sexism- I’ve done my share of protecting my hearth the last 17 years; I am talking about hardwiring here.)
In modern society, the battles most fight are across the internal landscape. We are no longer fighting tooth and nail for food and shelter, or even land. We maintain the same adrenaline rush, but without the physical release. I’m sure much has been written about this. My sons will not go into hand-to-hand combat (unless they have a penchant for ultimate [idiot] fighting, like their father). My sons will slay different dragons in their heads and hearts and psyches, with the same chemical changes and anxieties in their bodies. They will have to discover outlets for the physical release of the angst that will accompany them, truly a bedmate to us all some days.
I wonder at the move to the interior as we have become sedentary in the exterior. There is no choice to an extent, but as we sit and watch moving pictures on a screen, or play video games impersonating heroes (or villains), I suspect the energy trapped makes disquietude grow. Some would say it’s just a change in lifestyle, others see it as evolution. I wonder if it isn’t lack of a positive spiritual force (and by this I do not mean only Christian). Are we not brave enough to suggest this lassitude is a negative in our lives? And then to do something about it? How do we expect boys who grow up killing people in video games to show deference across the dinner table with no rumblings of dissatisfaction?
I continue to work to give my sons (and daughters) the means to do battle. I want them to fight poverty, domestic violence, damaging patriarchal refuse, injustice. I want them to fight for peace, for love, for exhausted blessed sleep at the end of the day after a nice run or bike ride to exorcise the tension.