Someone wrote something about me the other day in a comment, which I've been thinking about since.
He wrote something along the lines of - that I don't fall into being a coward. That I say what I mean. That for me it's about something deeper than money and popularity.
That is true.
I was glad for it. Of course I was. Man does that when he is seen. But what stuck wasn't the praise, which I still struggle with.
It was the measuring stick.
Because a sentence like that isn't a medal you can rest on. It's a standard you'll be measured against the rest of your life. Especially as a man.
There's an old distinction that's surfacing again in these years, because the times call for it - the distinction between the nice man and the good man. People meet it as if it were new. It isn't. And I didn't first meet it as wisdom.
I met it as diagnosis.
Because I was the nice man. To a degree where it was nearly erasing me. Agreed with everyone. Yeah, fine, whatever works. I glided through every room without friction, everyone liked me, and no one really knew who I was or what I stood for. Not even myself. To get along with everyone actually only requires one thing - that you don't stand for anything. And that price I paid, until there was almost no human left to pay with.
It's over twenty years ago - I first caught sight of that monster - through David Deida and Robert Glover's work. And it took me the better part of twelve years to get a firm grip around its throat. Twelve years learning what the good man is. That he has ideals. Things he stands for, things he stands against - and that he is willing to be tested on both. That he draws the line high and clear, long before anyone approaches it.
Not because he's looking for a fight. But because those he loves must know - come after what he loves, and there will be consequences.
But the grip alone wasn't enough.
Only as Christianity revealed itself did the last piece fall into place for me. Because Jesus doesn't say that he knows the Truth. He says - I am the Truth. And reading the gospels with open eyes, you see what the Truth does when it walks among people.
It isn't nice. It overturns the moneychangers' tables in the temple. It calls the hypocrites what they are, right to their faces. And it is simultaneously infinitely gentle toward the broken, the outcast, the sinner who already knows it himself. Never hard toward the weak. Never soft toward the Lie. That is The Good Man in his complete form.
And it cost him the cross.
When I understood that, it was no longer a choice. Then it became an unshakeable duty to follow that voice which first spoke within - and which later asked me to say aloud what it said.
My voice doesn't come from hardness. And never from aggression. It comes from clarity.
This is me.
That is not.
We've spent at least two generations raising boys to become nice men. We've taught them that the highest virtue is not to offend anyone, not to take up space, not to insist, not to draw boundaries. We've confused the absence of conflict with the presence of goodness.
And the pattern scales. A culture of nice men becomes a nice culture. One that agrees with everyone. One that glides. One that doesn't dare say no to anyone at all - not even at its own door.
On Monday a man was nearly beheaded on an open street in Belfast. The perpetrator had travelled from Sudan via Paris to Dublin and on to Belfast, where he sought asylum and received residence permission. The Nice Society welcomed him in without asking a single relevant question, because questions aren't nice.
And when the crime happened, The Nice Society couldn't even call it by name. The first reports from The Man on the Television and his Experts spoke of "a stabbing".
It was the recordings that had to tell the story correctly. All that which wasn't nice to say.
Ask then what it means for women and children to live in a society where the men are raised that way. We've made "patriarchy" into a slur and forgotten what the word carries -
The Father who stands between his family and the world. Him who says no at the door, so yes can be said within.
Ten thousand girls in English cities have learned over two decades what it costs when he is absent - when men with power and responsibility looked the other way, because it was uncomfortable to look, and even more uncomfortable to say it aloud. You don't do that when you're nice.
Nice avoids.
Good protects.
And you can only protect what you dare stand by. And what you stand by. That you must dare say aloud.
So now you know why.
❤️🔥🪽
