Half A Century Later
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
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What is it that shapes the ethos of our culture? More importantly -- because it is the only one we can control – what is it that shapes our personal ethics? But ethics isn’t really an “it,” is it? It’s a many. There are many people, books, peer pressures, chance encounters, twists of fate, conscious choices, and accidents of nature that form our moral compasses. Or fail to form one within us.
There are psychologists who claim that our morals are formed by age five. That simply how we are treated as children, and without any intentional guidance or instruction, our clay is hardened into an irrevocable form. For myself, not having hard knowledge to dispute them, I just go with my gut and say, “Nah.” We aren’t ceramics. We’re more like the spacecraft, Voyager, heading on a predetermined course, but absolutely open to mid-course corrections.
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
I presumptuously declared at the outset that we can control only our own personal ethics and not those of our community (although there are times and people I wish I could), therefore, I will discuss only my own. I hope the specific may somehow apply to the general. And at this juncture, we will leave the Vonneguts behind.
As I arrived on Planet Earth in the year 1946, my beginnings were unlike nearly ALL the people who are alive today. Nearly all the seven billion people with whom we share the Pale Blue Dot are younger than I. That fact gives me a bit more pause than it probably gives you. And because of my early arrival, my perspective undoubtedly varies.
Without taking the old saw from my toolbox of walking five miles to school in the snow – uphill both ways – a few brief highlights may prove informative. No television until age 4, and then only 3 snowy stations. Entire neighborhoods of mothers who were home with the kids. World War II a recent experience for the parents, and the Great Depression clearly remembered – with values from both passed down. Never Waste. Not a single computer, tablet, or mobile phone in existence. Horse-drawn bakery wagons delivering daily to homes. But most different, and probably a byproduct of a just war – a definite distinction between right and wrong.
“…and who, disguised as Clark Kent, fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
And yes, we experienced the Red Menace, Duck and Cover Drills to save us from A-Bombs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Right Act, and the Space Race. But far and away, the most impactful experience in the shaping of my moral compass was guilt from surviving the war in Vietnam when more than 58,000 of my brothers did not. Why? That is the question that resounds to this day.
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
I had trudged through the jungle as a lowly rifleman, an infantry “grunt.” I had waded through rivers, dug foxholes, sweated profusely, fought exhaustion in the Highland jungles, fought the enemy, fired my M-16 and threw grenades, been under fire by thundering rockets and mortars, been wounded and survived. That fact, the guilt of survival and the guilt of killing has informed my entire life and actions in the half-century since.
My ethos. My moral compass. To help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. To help. To do some good on behalf of those whose lives were taken before they could contribute their goodness to the world. To offer a hand up. To offer kindness. To someday be worthy of a very simple epitaph, “He was a good man.”
“The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”
“Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
But there is more. For one cannot neglect one’s self. To endure, to have the strength and will to “help each other get through this thing,” one must be kind to one’s self, to restore what is spent. Unless one is a saint like a Mother Teresa or Dr. Albert Schweitzer, one cannot give ceaselessly without emptying the well. Water must flow into the well – as well.
“He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England; it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread of the seagulls or love.”
At age 86, John le Carré, is nearing the end of his writing career. But his books will endure along with the many screen adaptations they have engendered. He has been honored, rightly, as the foremost “spy novelist,” in the world, but the reason his work will endure is because his books are much more than that. David Cornwell, his real name, has created a vast resource that explores treachery, deception, uncertainty, but most saliently – a profound moral ambiguity. A moral ambiguity that resonates as the opposite of Superman’s certainty of right and wrong. The difference is both historically fascinating and ethically so.
“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing.”
Here in the United States, we find ourselves in a deeply disturbing crisis – a Constitutional crisis, an ethical crisis, a moral crisis, a racial crisis, an environmental crisis, an educational crisis. Whether or not this is the place for these comments, I do not know. What I do know is that the moral imperative that has driven me since Vietnam will not allow me to be silent. Nor will it allow le Carre to be silent. The author, who knows political intrigue well and who once worked for Britain’s MI-6 spoke out.
“Something truly, seriously bad is happening and from my point of view we have to be awake to that.
These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake news, everything becomes fake news.
I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.
These are infectious forms of demagogic behaviour and they are toxic.”
If we are, in fact, “to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is,” and I sincerely believe we are, then I also believe we are morally bound to stand up for the disadvantaged who are being both dismissed and assailed as somehow unworthy. To stand against the dismantling of environmental protections in favor of corporate profit. To stand against a “leader” (i.e. demagogue) who makes all his decisions based on how it will enrich him, his family, or his financial friends.
“You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It’s ‘God save our multinational’ they’re singing these days.”
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Notes:
Image: “Vietnam Memorial” by Ciarán Ó Muirgheasa is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.
1) Brown, Mark. “John Le Carré on Trump: 'Something Seriously Bad Is Happening'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 7 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/07/john-le-carre-on-trump-something-truly-seriously-bad-is-happening.