We are the 53%

Inspirational way of being

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”

 

-John Quincy Adams

Looking for a few good men

The media fails to present young men with honorable role models and instead suggests that they're superfluous--when now is the time that they're needed more than ever before! With all of the single-parent homes, abuse, and familial instability, we need responsible, committed, loving dads more than ever.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/primetimes-looming-male-identity-crisis/244692/#slide1

Samizdat has engaged with similar topics before featuring a number of posts about men's need to be needed, the rise of drifting boys, and misandry.

Guiding lights

"Are my guiding principles healthy and robust? On this hangs everything."

-Marcus Aurelius

Conviction

"If it is good to say or do something, then it is even better to be criticized for having said or done it."

-Marcus Aurelius

Family: The Fundamental Unit of Society

"Families create a crucial organizational level between the individual and the massive structures of government and business conglomerate. The family is the "little platoon" that gives each individual a sense of personal meaning for his or her life. Other than teaching us our basic citizenship duties, it is not the place of government of the marketplace to tell us what our most personal lie purposes should be. Rather, government and business are supposed to maintain the political and economic stability that will allow each of us to pursue the life purpose we draw from such meaning-generating sources as religion and family life.

So we have historically given the family the immensely important power of deciding which personal values children should learn. We would never allow state control over childrearing, as was a characteristic of Soviet communism, because that control destroys the diversity and range of free choice that democracy is designed to protect.

Without the decentralized authority that lets families and churches play this mediating role between individuals and society's megastructures, we are vulnerable to totalitarianism, which imposes on society one comprehensive order of meaning. Even if our government remains democratic, however, the nation's family and religious structures can grow weak, as they are now becoming. When that happens, people wander in search of personal purpose, often falling prey to the meaningless addictions of materialism and pleasure-seeking."

-Bruce C. Hafen
"Covenant Hearts," pp. 246-247

Measure of a Man

"Bear in mind that the measure of a man is the worth of the things he cares about."

Marcus Aurelius