Tag Archives: mourning

Crier and Cried

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Crier or cried: (v) one who cries or past tense of cry

It is at the core of the gender wars.

Historically, if not mythically, the contention is that women cry and men endure.

This crying is interpreted as weakness.

So a man may be willing to admit that he has cried—but would resent the hell out of being identified as a crier. On the other hand, females make no bones about the fact that they cried and are not nearly as put out with being referred to as a crier.

It creates the unrighteous and inequitable standard that those who shed tears may be sensitive, but that carrying such a profile is dangerous in a world where toughness is extoled as power. However, here is a fact that’s important to know:

Great men throughout history not only cried but were known to be criers.

From Jesus Christ to Abraham Lincoln you have examples of human males who were susceptible to tears because their hearts could be broken at the sight of pain, and the anger that might flush their feelings and cause mourning.

Let us not forget, at the end of every football game, one team departs cheering, and the other cries—or certainly has members who are criers.

I have cried.

I am willing to admit that I’m a crier.

I am a voice crying in the present wilderness.

My proclamations, though often filled with humor and wit, are saturated with tears of misgiving and sadness.

If you haven’t cried, you haven’t felt.

And if you aren’t a crier, you rob yourself of being known as a person with a depth of feeling.

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Battalion

Battalion: (n) a large body of troops ready for battleDictionary B

Every once in a while I think about my own death.

It makes me cry.

You know why? I start thinking about all the people I know and how devastated they will be with my absence.

It’s very silly.

But you see, the only life that completely matters in my thinking is mine.

I try to be equally as concerned about others. Sometimes I muster some real mourning for their well-being, but nothing on the level of the compassion and care I have for myself.

I suppose I should feel bad about that–but since it’s not going away, and I am certainly not alone, I will choose to guide it by understanding the value of all human life.

When I was sixteen years old, hundreds of young American men were dying in Vietnam every week. We had a death toll number. It wasn’t like the numbers tallied nowadays over mass shootings, earthquakes or explosions. Many of these young fellows had just been in our classrooms, churches and bagging groceries in our supermarkets three months earlier, and now they were returning home draped in flags.

It seemed surreal but became our reality.

We were experiencing battalions of young American males going off to fight in a jungle and coming home dead.

There was a sensitivity that swept the young generation.

It was reflected in the music.

It was being released from our pores as we stood side-by-side, wondering what in the hell could all this mean.

So gradually, we joined together and became battalions of protestors. We went off to a different kind of war. It was a war waged against war, because the war being executed was killing us.

We had a greater awareness. We asked questions like, “Where have all the flowers gone?”–waiting for an intelligent answer.

Nowadays we speak of war in a clinical Ethernet third person. It is something we launch rather than something that strikes back at us, filling up coffins and alarming us to its viciousness.

We have a professional army with people who have made a profession out of arming themselves and going off to wars that have been created by old men who miss John Wayne.

Nowadays our grocery baggers get to go to college without ever feeling the loss of life.

I would not wish the agony of Vietnam and the deaths of friends and loved ones on anyone, but it would be terrific to have battalions of young people who are socially, spiritually and emotionally conscious of our aching world … instead of battalions of soldiers chasing the errors of misguided politicians.

 

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