I had the pleasure today of participating in the Ultimate Men’s Summit, where I spoke with Lion Goodman about some of the issues faced by men and boys in western culture.
Naturally, the subject of family law was addressed and the basics that most readers of AVfM are well aware of were covered.
During the interview, Mr. Goodman made the inquiry about why there is so much anger in men in the men’s rights movement. I can’t fault him for asking. I think he is a good person, and in a world where the pain of men is invisible it must be one hell of a mind-fuck trying to make sense of why so many of us are pissed, and getting more so.
But I have just been advised of something that might help explain the matter with a little more impact, at least to those who have any sense of decency and justice at all.
This is just a partial clip of a letter sent to the New Hampshire Sentinel Source that Mr. Tom Ball, a man who has been through the ringer of family courts in Cheshire Country, New Hampshire in recent times. The tone of it is clearly angry.
Said Mr. Ball:
I could have made a phone call or two and borrowed the money. But I am done being bullied for being a man. I cannot believe these people in Washington are so stupid to think they can govern Americans with an iron fist. Twenty-five years ago, the federal government declared war on men. It is time now to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.
This was part of a much, much lengthier letter, and came to them some time before Mr. Ball approached the country courthouse steps, and set himself on fire.
Does this make the pain a little clearer?
I know what is expected in this culture. I am supposed to express some form of outrage. I am supposed to demand changes to the system and justice for men. I am supposed to bemoan a biased system and the lost rights of fathers in this country. I do exert all that for now. I do so from the bottom of my heart.
But I am also tired. I am an older man and have witnessed this silent, ignored tragedy for far too long. I am sick and tired of the heartbreak of daily emails from broke, abused, powerless people pleading for any kind of help they can get against a system that has lost all sense of justice and every last bit of justification for its own existence.
I am tired of telling them there is nowhere to turn.
I am a pacifist. I do not advocate violence. But I tell you this. The day I see one of these absolutely incredulous excuses for a judge dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice, I will be the first to put on the pages of this website that what happened was a minor tragedy that pales by far in comparison to the systematic brutality and thuggery inflicted daily on American fathers by those courts and their police henchmen.
It would not even so much be a tragedy as the chickens coming home to roost. And it is certainly less of an indecency than the suicide of Tom Ball.
This is a system beyond redemption and beyond repair. It is a cancer that must be cut out with focus and intent.
Whether that happens under the reasonable control of a government that manages to find some long absent decency, or at the hands of a mob when the time comes that men are not satisfied with just setting themselves on fire, remains to be seen.
But either way it will happen. It has to. This sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.
