I have noticed in life that our strengths are often the same as our weaknesses. There are an almost limitless combination of events and challenges that make up each persons life. A person without strengths cannot make it through all of these challenges. However, a person who never grows beyond his or her strength becomes imprisoned by them and unable to adapt to new situations. Eventually they will find that the strengths that have carried them through so many challenges will box them in and make them unable to respond in opposite situations. I have noticed this in my all so short life of sixty four years, however, it was something I had fully realized in my own life before I hit thirty.
Welcome Freedom Troopers and Reforgers of the Foundations of Western Civilization to another installment of What Your Father Should Have Taught You. But in this case, it was not just my father but my elder sister who taught me this (although we did both have the same father.) They taught me that when a person is young, they need to work on defining themselves and honing their strengths later they need to work on their weaknesses. My sister in her academic studies was more specific, she said that the midlife crisis often occurs when we find ourselves at a point that our strengths begin to fail us. Not because they are no longer strong but because we realize there are situations that our strengths can entrap us in behaviors that actually hurt us instead of helping us. At that point, she said, a person needs to work on their shadow side. Someone who passes mid-life and has never begun to work to improve their weaknesses will never become a fully rounded person. Conversely, a person who takes the wrong lesson from this and gives up their strengths entirely to totally embrace their weaknesses, simply because their strengths have failed them in one situation has totally lost their way in life. The key is integration and there used to be many great movies that illustrated this, both positively and negatively.
Some movies that illustrate this principle are Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider, Gerard Bulter’s Gladiator, the old black and white movie Shane, Zulu, The Shoes of the Fisherman, as well as John Wayne’s True Grit. In each of these we see a different aspect of this truth. That is why these movies resonate deeply with us; they are not just great action adventure and drama, but they are lessons that speak to the soul. Something that too many modern movies that are built by stringing together “neat action scene after neat scene” fail to get, like people who live solely for their identity on social media, they have no soul.
You may have seen some movies like this yourself, if so, I would love to see them too. Put them in the comments and share them with me. [Please remember, I have had to put the comments on manual approval because of bots that have been posting advertisements on my pages, but I will approve them.]
I will only go through one movie in detail and just outline the others. In Gladiator it is the very honor and loyalty of Maximus that allows him to be betrayed and to refuse to do what is necessary to seize power and thus allows a tyrant to ascend the throne of Empire. His error causes the loss of the lives not only of his own family but of thousands in Rome under a madman. In Shane, a gunfighter, hopes to start a new life with a family and is inevitably drawn back into the way of the gun because he refuses to stand back and allow injustice. He gives up his own happiness to do what he feels is right and the movie ends with the pain that loss causes not just him but the woman and young boy he had dared to hope could become his family. In Zulu, two men with opposite strengths start out at loggerheads as their different natures war with each other until they learn to each rely on the strengths of the other to cover their own weaknesses. In The Shoes of the Fisherman, a humble Russian Priest is freed from the Gulag in Russia and is made a Cardinal. He tries to navigate the politics of the Vatican and preserve his own great faith and humility while still assuming the responsibility God places before him, it is one of my fav movies, although really all of these are.
In True Grit the gruff and blustery Rooster Cogburn is sought out by a young teen girl Mattie Ross (played by the young woman Kim Darby,) to get justice for the murder of her father and the movie is as much about the triad of different personalities between this headstrong girl determined to get justice, the gruff old marshal, and a young suave Texas Ranger LaBeuf (played by Glen Campbell), and their learning to rely on each other’s strengths to get through deadly encounter after deadly encounter. At one point Rooster Cogburn/John Wayne says of the Texas Ranger who he originally doesn’t think is strong enough or tough enough to keep up with him: “That Texican saved my life three times, once after he was dead.”
[As a side note This is another example of the insanity and ignorance of modern feminists who have swallowed the Kool Aid and don’t know what they are talking about, believing a false narrative of patriarchy and oppression promulgated by Leftist propaganda. True Grit came out in 1969, and it was the determination of a young teen girl that drives this old gruff US Marshal and a Texas Ranger to do their jobs, and she is with them every step of the way. But young women as oblivious as Jennifer Lawrence after making the movie Hunger Games can tout their own ignorance and say, “finally there is a strong female lead character.” {See Blood and Courage, The Heroes We Grew Up With – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth where I destroy this phony narrative of feminism with just a few of the strong female leads I grew up with, not to mention my mother had a degree and was a professional counselor of the Student Nurses and my sister had her PhD and taught Spanish and German, and I was born in 1960. No one was WAITING for Jennifer Lawrence to save us.)
There is nothing so pathetic as people owning themselves in their ignorance of what has really happened before their own pathetically short life came into the world. Life and civilization did not begin at our birth, it was not created just for us, we are part of a long chain of humanity, a chain in which too many today have betrayed thousands of generations who survived war, famine, sabretooth cats, and other dangers to pass on their genes on to the future only to have young narcissistic whiners ending their long genetic line due to their own hubris or erroneous 19th Century calculations of overpopulation done by a priest who assumed steady population increase but that (in the 1800s) humanity had advanced as far technologically as they ever would.
Mel Gibson played Benjamin Martin the main character, in the movie the Patriot where Benjamin Martin is styled loosely after Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution. Francis Marion was born in Berkeley County, South Carolina in 1732 in British America and died in 1795 in Berkeley County, South Carolina, in the United States of America; a United States that might not have been if it had not been for his tireless and principled resistance and mastery of Indian Hit and Run tactics in the Southern States. The real Francis Marion, unlike Gibson’s character who is good looking and well built, while Marion by the time of the revolution was a bit awkward, kinda plain looking, and lame in one foot. However, both Martin and Marion had the strength of character to persevere through their challenges and overcome deadly and crushing challenges that would have destroyed lesser men.
We see in the movie that Martin/Marion had a strength in military service and warfare that both learned fighting alongside the British in the French and Indian War (what Europeans call The Seven Years War, they were both The Seven Years War its just that the French and Indian War was the North American part of it. The war was brutal and both sides had Indian allies who used the war for their own purposes to pay off old grudges with other tribes. The Europeans learned about brutal hit and run warfare as the Native Americans fought it and the War saw many villages of the French, British, and Native Americans slaughtered, raped, scalped, and burned out of their houses and crops. The native Americans also used the opportunity to gather more slaves, although both French and British sometimes tried to impose a more European “gentlemanly” way of fighting on the conflict this sometimes caused the Native American tribes to become angry because they were not allowed to plunder and take the slaves that they assumed was their due. For this and many other reasons the alliances and enmities between the French, British and their Native American allies and enemies kept shifting and sometimes entire armies that were disarmed and given safe passaage to return home by European Commanders were attacked and murdered by Native Americans who wanted their plunder and vengeance. In the movie, as in real life, Martin/Marion learned the need for discipline and rules in warfare but also the brutal reality and effectiveness of hit and run warfare. Marion, for one, was a stickler throughout the war of not allowing his men to plunder when, in the Revolution, as fought in the South, that was one of the ways both British and American Commanders paid their militia was by plunder and theft. This gave the Revolutionary War in the South a particularly brutal nature and the British tied up thousands of troops trying to hunt down Marion’s little band which was never more than a couple hundred and usually much smaller. (only a few dozen).
Marion/Martin is incredibly good at this warfare. But, at the same time strongly resisted it because of the brutality that he knew that warefare inevitably brought. The character that is Martin’s son in the movie, fighting with him and dying; in real life was Marion’s nephew and they were very close, almost like a father/son relationship. At the start of the movie Martin/Marion has the tools of his older life – his strengths – locked away in a chest and is stubbornly trying to be a family man and a carpenter and he definitely doesn’t have the skills for a carpenter. His refusal to get into the war ads to the tragedy as the war comes to him killing his sons, endangering his family, and burning the home that he built with his wife, to the ground. He has to return to his war skills to save his son who is taken away by the British. This movie ends happily as he is finally able to return to his opposite (which truly is as much himself as his strength) the peaceful life of a country scholar and family man that both Martin and Marion long for. Both the movie and the biographies of Francis Marion are worth your time.
In Pale Rider, a former gun-fighter has put on the collar of a preacher and is traveling through the West trying to avoid his former ways. However, he is faced with both “temptations of the flesh” and his hatred of injustice, causing him to return to the way of the gun and also to inspire the resistance of a group of miners to stand up for themselves. In the end he, like Shane, returns to the life he knew riding off to fight more injustices, a task that the audience knows will never be finished.
I said our strengths are often our weaknesses. That is because life has so very many challenges and they come at us from everywhere. If we can improvise, adapt, overcome, and develop our weaknesses we can navigate life to our happy ending. If we can develop our shadow side, without losing our strengths we can successfully navigate the struggles of life. Or conversely, like Rooster Cogburn and the officers in Zulu, we can find others who balance us out and move forward as a team. Conversely, like Gibson’s character, Shane, or Eastwood’s character in Pale Rider, we can find a woman, who helps us round out our nature and maybe build a happy life and family.
Actually I recently watched Nicholas Cage in The Old Ways that had a similar story although he and his daughter were both psychopaths who had been civilized by the love of a good woman. That is a good movie too but I would not call psychopathy a strength, however it IS interesting and, in this movie, it does obtain justice.
Here I want to give a caution that apparently, too many parents failed to teach the younger generations today. The difference between finding your happy ending and failing is never giving up. Think about every happy ending story you have heard. If you stop that story before the final confrontation and victory that brings about the “happy ending” the story would be a tragedy. The difference is gained by not giving up and pushing through to that final happy ending. The hero didn’t retreat into blaming others for their failures, hide in coloring books, fantasy, video games or safe spaces. They pushed through their struggle and finally came out on top. [For more on this see Life is Struggle, But It Beats the Alternative – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth and To Be or Not to Be – Learn to Truly Live! – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth and Excellence Is Your Destiny – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth .]
Let’s look at the 3rd Chapter of Ecclesiastes (verses 1-8):
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
As I have said before. The secret of life is to know what time it is. And dogmatic idealists can never deal with their own shadow or embrace the opposites they need in order to find a happy ending. Maybe that is why they are so unhappy.
