Dudes Rock

Y ou may not have heard, but November 19 is International Men’s Day. It’s a far more obscure holiday than International Women’s Day, which was greeted with enormous fanfare by every major institution from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to the White House back in March. Instead, the sparse coverage of today’s celebration of men has been almost exclusively directed at . . . further undermining men. Metro took the occasion as an opportunity to speak “to men about their genuine concerns regarding their gender in our society,” and the Vagina Museum — yes, there is an entire brick-and-mortar museum dedicated to vaginas — tweeted that “it’s #InternationalMensDay, so we’re going to introduce you to some trans men from history today.” Of course, the predictable corners of social media were flooded with complaints that the holiday existed at all — because “every day is men’s day under the patriarchy.”

We could gripe about these disparities as yet another illustration of how much of modern American society is hostile to the celebration of manhood. But listen: Forget all of that. Today is our day, fellas. There are 364 other days of the year to fight the good fight. Conservatism, as Yuval Levin has argued, is gratitude. In fact, it’s even more than gratitude — it’s joy. Amid all the gloomy talk of civilizational decline, we should not forget that we Americans are the beneficiaries of a glorious and noble inheritance. Even today, our tradition bestows enormous privileges on all of us. And American manliness — not just the legendary feats of our larger-than-life heroes, but the ordinary decency and goodness of countless brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers in the humblest corners of American life — is one of the most important privileges of all.

On International Men’s Day — this most auspicious of holidays — let’s take a moment to remember that. Amid the unspeakable tragedies of the past year, American manhood has remained a force for good.

American men are courageous. They always have been, dating back to the signatories of the Declaration of Independence pledging their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to found our nation. That courage can often be tragic, from the young soldiers who died evacuating Kabul to the California zip-line worker who sacrificed himself to save a woman he was stranded with in the middle of a ride, dropping 70 feet to his death earlier this month in an attempt to stop them from both falling under their combined weight. But it is also miraculous, and can manifest at the earliest of ages, as we saw when a seven-year-old Florida boy swam for an hour to save the lives of his father and four-year-old sister when the three were stranded in the middle of a river in June.

American men are kind and generous. We saw that everywhere this year, from the Marines in Virginia trudging through knee-deep water in a flash flood to help pull stranded cars to safety — “Oh my God, this is the most American thing ever,” a woman in one of the cars remarked — to the soldier with an amputated leg who visited a disabled little boy’s home to “show him that disability can’t hold him back.” Last month, Officer Kevin Coates pulled over a man for speeding, only to find the 79-year-old driver emotionally distraught because his wife was sick and his son was mentally ill. The man had just bought a new TV and wanted to hook it up to make his wife happy. Rather than give him a ticket, Officer Coates accompanied him to his house to help him connect the TV.

Every day, American men in uniform regularly perform heroic acts that few people hear of — one of the tragedies of the widespread effort to villainize police officers is that it has become anathema to celebrate these stories. But just this week, officers in Atlanta pulled an unconscious man from a burning car, saving his life; two weeks before that, cops in Florida did the same. In October, Deputy Marcus Dawson ran into a burning building to save a terrified toddler’s life.

American men are loving fathers. They’ll do anything for their family, up to and including putting their own lives on the line. Just take last week’s tragic story of the Michigan dad who sacrificed himself to save his daughter by “hugging her in the last few moments of his life” as their plane went down near Beaver Island. “He cradled her in his arms,” the man’s widow told CNN. “She doesn’t remember anything, except for her daddy squeezing her so hard.” That was enough to cushion the blow to save his eleven-year-old daughter’s life. She was the sole survivor in the crash.

Finally, American men are capable of amazing, miraculous things in the face of adversity. This June, a lobster diver off the coast of Cape Cod was gulped into the mouth of a humpback whale, where he struggled for about 30 seconds before managing to make it out with only bruising and a dislocated knee. In 2012, a 15-year-old boy from Colorado was told that he had a 1 percent chance of ever walking again after a car crash paralyzed him from the waist down; this May, he took his first steps in nine years. And Johnny Kim, a 37-year-old Korean American who had previously been both a Harvard-trained doctor and a Navy SEAL who served in over 100 combat missions, was selected by NASA to serve as the International Space Station’s increment lead for Expedition 65 in April. A Harvard-trained doctor, a Navy SEAL, and a NASA astronaut in less than four decades.

That’s American manhood. That’s what it has always meant to be an American man, from the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower through to today. We built the best damn country in the history of the world, and we should be proud of it. It’s worth fighting for — and today, in particular, it’s worth celebrating. Happy International Men’s Day.