Perspective

Part III
Perspective

 
When Scott and I were growing up, I truly believed that my parents and most adults knew what they were talking about. I never thought of the reality that all of the adults raising children, making business operations run day to day, and struggling through life one day at a time were more or less making it all up as they went along.

I recall a time when 30 used to be old and even difficult to imagine. 30 for me was 11 years ago, now. I had more hair and wore pants 2 sizes smaller in the waist. I became a father myself that year. I still felt young and on my way up. Still trying to prove myself. Aware of how much I hadn’t known until 30, and how much I still had to learn. I thought I had known a lot when I was 20. By 40, I knew even if I kept learning, I’d never really know jack shit.

Somehow I’d always imagined my parents being far more knowledgeable and grown up at 30 than I felt then. I’d even had teachers while growing up who were 30, or even a bit younger. Surely they knew what they were doing? The authority figures I grew up under must have been more certain about things than I felt.

I used to look around on occasions over the past decade at my friends and co-workers and realize we were not all that different from how our parents had been back when we were children and they were in their late 20’s and 30’s. But how could it be? Had our parents actually still felt young themselves while already old in our eyes? Had they made the same stupid kinds of jokes? Still had to shrug off the same uncertainties? The same frustrations at work? At home? With my brother and I? Is this what it had felt like for them?

Adults had seemed so much older and wiser back when I was a child. Like the way I remembered the lockers at my elementary school being much taller until I went back once while I was in high-school and found they were actually quite small and I had to reach down to touch the locks.

The world seems enormous on the ground. Plots of land as far as the eye can see can become something worth fighting and killing over. Then, from the window of an airplane, you can look down and everything seems much smaller and far less significant and you see there is so much more of it.

In a famous photo taken when I was 8 years old, and transmitted to us from a satellite 3.7 billion miles away, everything we knew - our whole world showed up as what Carl Sagan described as a, “pale, blue dot,” against the extreme vastness of our galaxy. He describes the folly of mankind in fighting and killing each other over fractions of a dot. How the totality of all the knowledge - everything we’ve ever known, is shown as a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. It’s well written, beautiful sentiment.

Perspective is everything.

It turns out my parents and most adults from my childhood were not vastly better people than us. They were no more mature, intelligent, or hard working than we were - and in some cases perhaps even less. Still hopeful or idealistic at times. No less likely to ultimately draw a line between devoting themselves along with their bank accounts towards saving the world and buying a new TV, a nicer car, a better pair of shoes and spending hours on the couch.

We all learned the tuning out the suffering all around us to focus on our own immediate families and material comforts. Occasionally spoiling our children or ourselves and even less often donating used clothing and small amounts of cash to charities of our choice to say we at least did something. We hoped for the best but we’d never demand it. Not really.

Why should folks like us need to sacrifice at all while such things as multi-billionaires existed anyway? Adults had told us that just one man can make a difference. We now had several men and women with enough personal wealth to take on and try to solve several global problems, but they refused. They wanted more for themselves. Some made massive donations and played globetrotting philanthropist in the press, but compared to the wealth of these folks, it seemed like the equivalent of a regular working class person donating $50.

In the face of so much suffering and so many problems, one average man at maximum effort and expense will just ruin his own life and join in the suffering. Not enough others will unite in the cause. There is no real solidarity when it counts. You can’t protest nonstop when you have bills to pay. Revolution is hard work for an army, and impossible for an individual. The deck is stacked and the scales are tipped too far. It’s awful to admit, but even the best of us can’t bring ourselves to devote 100%. Even 10% is a fantasy. Once you recognize that, everything becomes a matter of degrees. Some care more than others, but nearly all realize it’s not going to change.

Most adults broke into one of two camps: Those who want to keep everything they can for themselves and whom couldn’t give a shit what anyone else thought about that, and those who at least have the decency to pretend they really care about the less fortunate by making small sacrifices and donations they can easily afford while patting themselves on the back. There are always exceptions. Rare saints who walk amongst us, but they are a statistically insignificant number. Even God can’t seem to stop poverty, hunger, or war.

There are folks who allow their bill at the cash register to be rounded up so the corporation that owns the register can donate the spare change to fund their own tax write off, and there are the folks who say, “No thanks.” Usually I opted not to round up my bill and instead patted myself on the back for the several loads of used clothing, unwanted household items, used appliances and electronics we had upgraded, and annual cash donations to charities that felt good enough given our monthly bills. Then I took my own tax write off for it.

Everyone who wasn’t incredibly wealthy was just trying their best in a horrifically rigged system. Nobody really knew the answers for sure. Everyone, myself included, was kinda full of shit when you got down to it and allowed yourself to be cynical. All adults weren’t actually wise and some adults had terrible advice. Sometimes even someone who was in their 70’s was anything but wise. Sometimes the words of a small child cut straight to the truth and through all the bullshit.

As it turns out, us adults are nothing special. Adults in no time of human history ever have been. Yet adults had always been in charge. We have always called the shots. We voted in the elections that are now in the history books. Suddenly it made a lot more sense that the world was so screwed up most of the time. Most people never really knew what the hell they were doing or what they were talking about. Some of them were aware of their uncertainty and tried desperately to hide it. “Fake it, till you make it.” Other’s couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Many weren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

There were no instruction manuals to being an adult, a parent, or having a successful career. We thought ourselves so smart, yet we were little more than upright apes with automobiles and firearms. Before the internet became so widely used we took a lot of information on trust. You saw or heard something on the TV or read something in the paper and accepted it. An adult you respected told you something and you ran with that.

I had no reasons as a child to doubt any adults or question any of the things my parents told me either. Most adults seemed wise and experienced and I trusted that they probably knew best, even when I didn’t really like what I heard.

Something hadn’t quite clicked the same way with my brother. Scott took every bit of help and kindness he could squeeze from our parents, especially Mom, but he always sort of looked down on them. Mom married young and had always been a housewife. Dad was miserable and always working. Scott suspected these people may not have the best advice and developed authority issues. He didn’t have the same kind of trust or faith as I had up into my 20’s. He began to smell the bullshit as a child.

Mom would try to talk to my brother and provide some guidance but he usually ignored what she said. Dad would bark orders and yell at him so he chose to rebel instead. My parents used to get very frustrated with him when he got into trouble or screwed something up, usually right after they’d tried to warn him against it. Dad would have an occasional man to man chat with Scott, but whatever advice he offered, Scott sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to the old man anyway.

Their relationship seemed more strained and less open than ours. Dad had regrets raising Scott and blamed himself for the way he turned out. My brother was a bit of a fuck up even as a kid, and I think Dad took things with me as a second chance to do it over and hope for better results. I think he tried to avoid repeating the same failures that he’d had with my brother, but I’m also not sure how much of the failure truly fell upon Dad. Scott noticed the difference in treatment regardless and added it to his resentments towards me.

I can’t be 100% sure, but it seems like my father never told my brother that he was proud of him - not once. I can’t recall him ever saying that he loved my brother out loud until he was prompted by my mother, as if forced to say something. That had to be tough, and I feel awful for my brother as far as that goes. Mom and I knew Dad loved Scott just as much as any of us, he just seemed incapable of showing it or saying it. He did make some effort with me. Usually short utterances like, “Good job, Jimmy,” or “Love ya, Bud,” but it was at least something.

Scott was the first born. The first son to carry on the family name and all that. He got the tough love. He was expected to be a man. Toughen up, and walk it off. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” was an often repeated threat from Dad. As far as he was concerned, life was hard, but it could be even worse if you let it be. Pull yourself up, brush yourself off, and move on. He didn’t want any excuses when we fell short of his expectations. Dad tried to do his best but due to his frequent absence, he left much of the day to day parenting up to our mother. He served more as a stern disciplinarian. Often Mom could get us to behave by warning that she’d tell Dad and let him straighten things out when he got home.

Dad was hardwired into that belief of hard work and chasing every penny you could with as much of the day’s hours as you could manage, even if it meant inconvenience or the sacrifice of other people’s time to help keep things in order while he worked. He saw mandatory overtime as a gift, not a theft of his personal time or inconvenience to the family’s schedule. “You gotta take it when you can get it,” he would say. Not having Dad around a lot was to be accepted as necessary because of the temporary financial gain.

If you were living in poverty for an extended period of time, you weren’t working as hard as Dad, at least according to him. (And maybe your wife wasn’t waiting at home taking care of the kids and everything else.) Even at 67 years old, he was still working 10 hours a day, and then spending another 4-6 hours on side projects. He just couldn’t sit down. For all that hard work, he couldn’t seem to get much ahead.

Mom grew used to being alone long before Dad died.