by Martin Hayes
In Mongolia
they put 8-year-old boys on the back of wild horses then smack that wild horse’s rump so that it runs off like the wind hoping that at some stage that 8-year-old boy after all of the falls and fails will learn how to tame that horse and become a man
In Australia
8-year-old boys who are darker than the invaders are still taken out by the Elders into that lonely place and made to sit there for days and nights without any food or water until they give up and need to come back to their mothers and sisters half-broken hopefully knowing then what it means if they want to even be considered a man
In Peru
8-year-old boys are made to stand on the edge of cliffs with a rope tied around their waists held and fed more slack by their fathers and uncles until they are gradually shown what it is like to stare over the precipice so that they too can hopefully come back and then value what they have more which is a needy heart and a needy soul like all men have
In London
8-year-old boys live with alcoholic mothers who hook up with junkie uncles and then run away to hide under the stairs in the hoover cupboard only to come out at 18 when everyone is dead with the whole world expecting them to be men
In Gaza
8-year-old boys sit in the back of Datsun Cherrys holding onto their grandmother’s hand who has just had one of her legs blown off by an Israeli state missile rushing her to the hospital that when they get there will be unable to help because another Israeli state missile has also hit that hospital in the same ruthless attack
Periodically, because of the needs of men, mothers and grandmothers will die in an 8-year-old’s arms
Meanwhile, in America
they put red MAGA baseball caps on those same 8-year-old boys’ heads and take them off to Trump rallies or plonk them on grass verges at demonstrations outside abortion clinics while getting their sisters to hold placards in their hands encouraging them to lift them up into the sky and scream
‘IF YOU LOVE ME,
YOU WILL KEEP MY COMANDMENTS!’
Everywhere around the world
8-year-old boys are being taught
how to become men
