It's Father's day.

My father is the definition of manliness to me. I've seen him work along side my uncle, my brother, and I in the fields above his house cutting firewood for the winter injured, just so my mother wouldn't have been cold in the months to come. He has and still does sacrifice his own happiness to supply the ones he loves with everything that they could possibly need. He sat vigilantly by my mother's side as she faded. He worked 12 hour shifts at the plant with a crushed pelvis for months just to wait till his stored up time was available and there wouldn't be a shortage or burden on his family. His staying at work, while in pain wasn't financially necessary, it was just because he wanted to make sure there was no need to worry about anything. He laid the foundation of what I see as how a man should act. I see through history that men act this way to protect and support the women that they love. When the Titanic sank, 74 percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the Men perished. Why? Because the Men followed the principle “women and children first.” This is Manly to me. In 479 BC, an insignificant number of Spartans, led by King Leonidas, held off the approaching Persian army, even when they were outnumbered by more than 1000 to 1. During the two days of battle the small force blocked the only road by which the massive Persian army could pass. It is still considered by many historians as a deciding factor in the eventual defeat of a Persian tyrant by free Greek men. This. Is. Manly.
But what do we with ourselves today?
Being a man does not have to mean going down in a shower of arrows. It does not mean that you have to drown or die. It simply means doing what is necessary to make the ones you love happy, whether they even know it or not. What matters most in life to a true man is the knowing in your heart that the choices you make will somehow protect the one you hold dear to your heart have a better life, even if they do not know you even did anything. The sense of what is manly lives in how we treat our women, our kids, our pets. When you have a son or daughter, you have to raise them to be adults correctly and teach them to be compassionate to those that have needs they can not meet. They have to remember the core values of what it means to be a man. Tough, selfless, able to laugh, brave, tolerant, self-reliant.
What matters today is that we recognize and remember the legacy that our fathers have lain down before us to live up to. We have to realize that the modern world would weaken or lull us into compliance if it could. The world needs men. It needs men like my father. It needs men like the ones on the Titanic. It even needs ones like Leonidas. We have to remember who we are and the men that our fathers would have us be. The world would be so much better for it if we all did.