What's it mean to be a man?

“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?”- Bob Dylan
 
I’ve always been the first to admit that by American and Iowan standards, I’m about as far as it gets from the traditional ideal of a manly man. In my defense, John Wayne and Nile Kinnick set the bar pretty high.
 
Growing up, bonding time with my dad consisted of studying geography and practicing baseball and basketball, which, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, failed to lead to any athletic scholarship offers. Then I learned how to play a guitar, got into rock n’ roll and spiraled into degeneracy, and the rest is history. Nowadays, Pops and I usually discuss politics and the books we’re reading, and he sends me drafts of his latest idea for a novel. 
           
I’ve never had the eye or the brain for construction, engineering, HVAC or any of the other skilled trades that are all the rage these days, and as I get older, it gets more and more frustrating. I can’t tell you much about my car other than “it runs,” and attempting to fix things more often than not leads to incidents like last Monday morning: what started as a routine climb up a ladder to check on a leak ended with Kellie and I making a trip to the Conrad clinic after I fell through the attic. I skinned up my arm, and she swallowed insulation. It was a lovely way to start the week.
           
For those of you who take umbrage with my political insights, none of this probably comes as any surprise. Typical snowflake! But the difference is that I find myself envious of the people who are gifted in these areas, and I know it isn’t the other way around. I always tell myself that one of these days I’m going to take an introductory woodworking or automotive maintenance class, but then I get caught up in more important endeavors like watching football or checking Donald Trump’s Twitter account. It’s safe to say that I won’t be hosting my own version of “Tool Time” in the near future.
           
Still, when I think of the ideal that men should aspire to, I think of my maternal grandfather for whom I’m named: Robert Heller. He passed away from thyroid cancer when I was two years old, and my mother telling me about how much fun we would have had growing up together puts tears in both of our eyes. Bob was a World War II veteran who married my grandma on a Naval base in Hawaii, a geology professor and later chancellor with a hall at the University of Minnesota-Duluth named after him, a builder, an avid fly fisherman and, most importantly, a loving father and husband.
           
I don’t think of the paranoid, delusional blowhards in Virginia and Boston marching with Tiki torches and flaunting the iconography that both of my grandfathers and millions of other American men and women fought tooth and nail to extinguish from the earth forever. The version of the country that they’re attempting to reclaim is never coming back, and while they’re entitled to express their opinions non-violently, we aren’t required to accept them as legitimate. Several of these self-proclaimed tough guys have since posted crying videos about how their lives are ruined, they’ve lost their jobs and people they’ve never met have attacked them viciously for their beliefs. A nice dose of karma, if I do say so myself.
           
I don’t think of a president who blames violence on “many sides” when the culprits are clear as day and seeks to “learn all of the facts first” but proceeds to spout off about Islamic terrorism within minutes of an attack halfway around the world just days later. Isn’t it possible to claim that both ideologies are reprehensible and have no place in a modern civilized society?
           
But maybe that’s asking too much of him. At this point, I’m not sure if we can do better. We got the world that we voted for, and we’re reaping the consequences of a 241-year racial wound that never seems to heal being picked at until it bleeds by an opportunistic demagogue with no regard for civility or basic human decency.
           
As the last few weeks have shown us locally, death is indiscriminate, and sometimes it makes no sense at all. The death of Heather Heyer, however, should lead us all to question the kind of country and the kind of world we want to live in.