By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star
January 06, 2008 07:23 am
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Jesus wept. — John 11:35
TERRE HAUTE — As a close election turned into a recount and legal challenge, the last few weeks have seen a truckload of nasty remarks dumped on several people in our community. Both candidates for mayor, especially, have taken big verbal hits from opposition supporters.
But nothing seems nastier to me than published letters and Internet postings that make fun of former mayor Kevin Burke for choking up with emotion in public.
By all means, despise a guy if you’re of a mind, and say why. If you’re among Democrats working to unseat him, well, heck, go ahead and pass on rumors as if they were facts.
But use a man’s public tears to try to belittle him? That kind of backward mentality should have gone out of civilized society with spouting racial slurs and calling little kids with glasses, “Four eyes.”
In fact, the first time I came across one of the boo-hoo comments about Burke, I checked the calendar to remind myself of the date. Eight years into the Third Millennium in a nation in which a majority of adults identify themselves as followers of a compassionate Christ, and yet some folks still think it’s amusing to put down a man for crying in front of other human beings.
Back in 1972, when Sen. Edmund Muskie teared-up over an unkind remark about his wife and doomed his campaign for president, Americans had an excuse (albeit flimsy) for being troglodytic about men’s emotional displays.
We were an off-shoot of the stiff-upper-lip British approach to public life and we didn’t know then what we know now about the health benefits of shedding tears.
Today, there is no excuse — even hotly contested local politics — for anyone to perpetuate the lie that real men don’t cry. Making fun of a man’s public tears only reveals the lack of inner confidence of the person who is poking fun.
Volumes have been written about men and crying since poor Muskie was exposed as a man who deeply loved his wife. Along with the chemical makeup of human tears, and the decrease of stress hormones that accompanies their shedding, we now know a great deal about shifting social attitudes toward public weeping.
One of those useful educational volumes is “Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” by Tom Lutz, a former University of Iowa professor now at the University of California, Riverside.
Among a zillion other factoids about tears, Lutz’s research found that public crying by men did not begin to take on a negative stigma in the West until the Industrial Revolution
In an informative article on thirdage.com, Lutz said, “Through most of history, tearlessness has not been the standard of manliness.”
But stoicism and physical stability became the prized characteristics of the worker in the late-18th Century. Any visible emotion but zeal for one’s job was viewed as useless or counter-productive.
In no time, weeping by anyone, including children in school or at their own dinner table, became a no-no.
To say this attitude is “unnatural” is a major understatement.
As Lutz told ThirdAge, “Weeping often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalize complex, overwhelming emotions and least able to fully articulate our feelings.”
Gee, how often would you say that set of conditions descends upon the modern American man or woman?
The irony is, with tears, nature has provided humans with a perfectly natural de-stressor that doesn’t require a doctor’s prescription, jumping through Medicare D hoops or a pricey membership at a gym. But backward societal attitudes still rob males — including boys — of this free, organic antidote.
We know it isn’t good for us to choke on our food or drink. If we’ve ingested spoiled food or poisoned ourselves with too much alcohol, we understand that the healthiest thing for us is to throw it up and purge our system.
So why do some folks persist in thinking it’s a positive act to deliberately choke back or tamp down our emotional tears?
Ordinary, reflexive tears that are caused by sadness, fear, frustration or joy are different from tears automatically produced for lubrication or those caused by onions or irritating, foreign substances in the eye.
Chemical breakdowns of all three types of tears show that emotional tears contain markedly more toxins, which are literally being washed from the body.
Also, among many hormones contained in emotional tears, is leucine enkephalin, a naturally produced painkiller.
After what women often term “a good cry,” the body is more relaxed. Endorphin levels are raised, blood pressure is lowered. People of both genders and all ages feel better.
The folks who have made sport of Kevin Burke’s public tears would never give a man a hard time for sweating in the hot sun or for having a red nose while shoveling snow in 18-degree weather. If they did, other folks would wonder what cave they’d been in for the last 100 or so years.
Maybe someday, sooner than later, the reaction will be the same to adults (or children) who don’t yet realize that calling someone a “crybaby” makes only one person look bad — and it’s not the guy with tears in his eyes.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
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Photos
Tribune-Star columnist Stephanie Salter.