Someone wrote something about me in a comment the other day, which I've been thinking about since.
He wrote something along the lines of - that I don't become a coward. That I say what I mean. That for me it's about something deeper than money and popularity.
That's true.
I was happy about it. Of course I was. That's what happens to a person when they're seen. But what stayed with me wasn't the praise, which I still struggle with.
It was the standard.
Because a sentence like that is not a medal you can rest on. It's a standard you're measured against for the rest of your life. Particularly as a man.
There's an old distinction that's surfacing again in these years, because the time calls for it - the distinction between the nice man and the good man. People encounter it as if it were new. It's not. And I didn't first encounter it as wisdom.
I encountered it as diagnosis.
Because I was the nice man. To a degree where it was nearly erasing me. Agreeing with everyone. Yes, fine, whatever works. I slid through every room without friction, everyone liked me, and no one really knew who I was or what I stood for. Not even myself. Because getting along with everyone actually only requires one thing - that you don't stand for anything. And I paid that price, until there was almost no person 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 neck. Twelve years of learning what the good man is. That he has ideals. Things he stands for, things he stands against - and that he's 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 need to know - if something comes for what he loves, there will be consequences.
But the grip alone wasn't enough.
Only as Christianity lifted its veil did the last piece fall into place for me. Because Jesus doesn't say he knows the Truth. He says - I am the Truth. And if you read the gospels with open eyes, you see what Truth does when it walks among people.
It's not nice. It overturns the money changers' tables in the temple. It calls hypocrites what they are, right to their faces. And it's simultaneously infinitely gentle with the broken, the outcast, the sinner who already knows it themselves. Never hard on the weak. Never soft on 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 unavoidable duty to follow that voice that first spoke inside - 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 traveled from Sudan via Paris to Dublin and on to Belfast, where he sought asylum and received a residence permit. The Nice Society invited him in without asking a single relevant question, because questions aren't nice.
And when the crime occurred, The Nice Society couldn't even call it by name. The first reports from The Man on Television and his Experts described it as "a stabbing".
It was the recordings that had to tell the story correctly. All that which wasn't nice to say.
Then ask 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. The one who says no at the door, so yes can be said inside.
Tens of thousands of girls in English towns have learned over two decades what it costs when he's gone - when men with power and responsibility looked the other way, because it was uncomfortable to look closely, 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. You must dare to say aloud.
So now you know why.
❤️🔥🪽
