HBO is currently running a documentary on Mr. Fred Rogers called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” For those too young to remember Mr. Rogers, or those from outside the US, or those who for whatever other reason simply never heard of him, Mr. Rogers was, from the late 1960’s into the 1990’s the host and driving force behind a show on PBS aimed squarely at *small* children titled “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.” Unlike virtually all childrens television, that show did *not* feature loud explosions, flashing lights, clowns, all that stuff. Instead, it mostly featured Mr. Rogers himself being *calm.*
He was, in a word, effeminate: people have long wondered if he might have been gay, but everyone who knew him is quite adamant that he was straight. On his show he was the very definition of “mild mannered,” and the people who knew him say that his off-camera persona was exactly the same. You’d *think* that he would be sort of the poster child of the SJWs… he just doesn’t seem terribly masculine. But I have an alternate take: he was a good example of a Man, and more to the point, a “toxic male.” Let me explain.
1: He knew what he wanted, he went for it and did not let obstacles stop him. He had his doubts about himself, but he did not publicly whine about them; he just plowed ahead with *his* agenda.
2: He knew that some people thought he was fruity and weird. And his response was *not* to demand acceptance or to wave his own flag or to preach about how awful people who didn’t like him were. He basically just shrugged off the haters and kept on being himself. He was comfortable with what he was, and didn’t care if you weren’t. Or at least if he did care, he didn’t make an issue of it.
3: He had a sense of morals and ethics, and he stuck to them. He knew what he considered right and wrong, and did not compromise in order to get people to like him (though he did do so from time to time in order to attain his greater goals).
4: He recognized the importance of control. The difference between the Man and the SJW is that the Man wants to control himself, while the SJW wants to control everybody else. We’re forever being told that keeping your emotions bottled up is a negative feature of toxic masculinity, that you are instead supposed to give vent to every feeling, to validate all your feels. But one of Mr. Rogers’ more famous little songs is “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?” which includes:
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?
…
It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:
I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
The message here is that rather than letting your feelings control you, you can control them. And to take pride in learning self-control. Imagine… taking pride in an *accomplishment,* rather than some aspect of your body or ancestry that you were merely born with.
5: And then… the way that very same song ends:
Know that there’s something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.
Imagine someone today suggesting that a boy can become a man, that a girl can become a woman… without at the same time suggesting that a girl can become a man, or in facts already is a boy, or is a furry, or a zir, or an otherkin, or what-the-hell-else. If that song came out today, the screaming about the lack of representation would be deafening.
That song seems to me to have a lot on common with Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” and there are few better tributes that can be paid to a piece of poetry.
He was a man from an era that is now gone. He was a man who deeply and truly cared about the welfare and upbringing of children, and was entirely open and honest about it (something that, these days, would make people suspicious). He was not the ideal of the Manly Man, but I gotta give respect to a man who lived as he chose and fought for what he believed… while not trying to be an authoritarian scold to those who did not agree with him. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and yet he did not, so far as I’m aware, ever inject his religious beliefs into his messages; he simply *lived* them.
If you’ve got HBO, watch the documentary. It’s good. I was especially impressed with the “foot bath with Officer Clemmons” bit. *This* is how you teach a moral lesson… get people thinking, rather than telling people they’re horrible… and still, to make it clear that there is right, and there is wrong.