From Nobody to Somebody to Nobody (Or, An Obituary With Substance)
Using my own life as an illustration (like what person’s life is more familiar to me?) this treatise illustrates how lives can be driven from nobody to somebody, less by the person themselves than by factors beyond his/her control. Over my lifetime I have become weary of so many people attributing their successes in life, modest or otherwise, to themselves—-inferring that all those who never became much of a somebody have nobody but themselves to blame. After all, in America, anybody can become somebody if they put their mind to it. That is so disingenuous. I suppose some characters might be exceptions, but they often do it by inheriting a lot of money, stiffing everyone in their way, insulting everyone different from themselves, and never assisting or sharing with the less fortunate. In the end all they ever reap is total discontentment about anything and everything in life. Exchanging contentment for anger seems a weird choice for a lifestyle.
You can skip all this life history below and go to the 7th paragraph from the end which begins “This musing was written to illustrate, via my own life……..”. My experiences were included here in case someone wonders just from where I get all these conclusions. Well, the same place most of us get our conclusions from: life experiences.
From a young child through college I was essentially a shy, socially aloof, disconnected from reality chap. The ultimate nobody. My world was small, self centered, a self contained bubble. There was nothing about me which was noteworthy. Frankly, the odds were I would remain an unremarkable nobody the rest of my life were it not for numerous individuals who, for I suppose differing reasons, pushed me into situations where I became somebody through no stellar effort myself. Interestingly, after retirement I instantly reverted to being a nobody, this time it was totally engineered by me. In this one musing are insights into the nature of this thing we call life, not the least of which is the question why anybody, after becoming somebody, would eagerly revert to being a nobody? Is becoming somebody a bad thing? This tale, if it has any insight at all, is worth pondering because it applies to millions of other nobodies who became somebody, no matter how modest, with, of course, their own personal uniqueness. Maybe this whole topic is more aptly described as Nothingness to Nobody to Somebody to Nobody to Nothingness, and the whole process taking up but a minuscule gleam of Time between two eternities. Thus, in the bigger picture, no-one is ever much of a somebody. I can’t remember ever emotionally and effectively reliving from memory the dinosaur days. Like it or not we are all disconnected from 99.9% of evolutionary history. It’s like in the Neil Diamond song: “
Well I'm New York City born and raised
But nowadays,
I'm lost between two shores
L.A.'s fine, but it ain't home
New York's home,
But it ain't mine no more
"I am"... I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
"I am"... I cried "I am"... said I
And I am lost and I can't
Even say why
Leavin' me lonely still “
While I will try to keep this historical timeline of the topic short, I sense I will fail. Everyone has a story to tell but most keep it to themselves. This I guess makes me different and not necessarily right about the story, or the story itself of any particular interest to others. It’s soul searching opinion—nothing more, a means to illustrate some points.
My path to somebody from nobody probably begins with something that has little to do with my doing. I could run fast for long distances. It was just genetic. And I didn’t choose (obviously) my genes. But even here this genetic characteristic would have left me a nobody except a certain energetic and goal directed coach managed to get me to come out for track at the tail end of my junior year, and cross country the fall of my senior year. Now cross country is one of the nothing-burger sports. No kid becomes known because he ran cross country. Not unless, in the first race he finished, after dropping out the first three races, he set the course record. No matter it was a course that hadn’t been around for long—didn’t matter—the announcement over the school homeroom speaker certainly sounded like quite an athletic feat. So did getting the most valuable runner award at the Fall Sports Banquet, a diminutive figure somewhat out of place amongst the football player hulks. Now 50 times more students knew who I was than before. So when I came to bat on the city softball league all the opponent players would start yelling, “Watch out he’s fast as hell, look for the bunt.” So suddenly I was well known for a reason I could not possibly claim was a personal achievement. I could simply run fast for long distance and the course record was not all that it seemed on the surface. At least I was some sort of somebody, and as a kid it doesn’t take much to make a nobody feel like a somebody.
In college nothing much changed in terms of being a non social nobody. I suppose enough athletes on campus knew of me only because I was the best 2 miler the team had. So I got minor publicity for that. I only was able to go to an expensive high tier college because my high school track coach assured them I would become a top tier runner. Well, I didn’t get much better as a runner BUT the college never took my scholarship away. Once again something I can take zero credit for personally is managing to finish at such a college. I was never a top tier student, with brain power oozing out for all to observe. I was simply a good student, and yet the Biology Chairperson yanked me out of nowheres to appoint me as the prestigious senior Biology lab assistant. I asked him why he picked me, and he said that I needed to have more exposure to others. Huh? I got a Graduate Student Teaching Assistantship which paid my way through graduate school because anyone from the college I went to was assumed to be a very good student. The Physiology Department I was part of for my Ph,D. was part of the Medical School, so most of my courses were with the medical students. That was stressful, as most of them were far smarter and better students than I. I was back being entrenched as a genuine nobody as a graduate student. I got a draft deferment because I was too ‘valuable’ to be risked in Vietnam. Another unmerited gift and obvious unethical political crime.
Having little interest in research I took a Master’s Degree and bolted to teach high school Biology for I think two years. The school was out in farmland, not a bad school at all, quite modern with a good faculty. I was immediately made cross country and assistant track coach. This high school was the smallest and weakest in their athletic conference. They were almost always at the bottom of the league in every sport. I understood from my former high school coach that recruiting and motivation were the main ingredients for success. Not a lot of strategy with putting one foot in front of the other for as long as you can as fast as you can. I met with the students who signed up to be on the cross country team. There was at most like maybe ten students, most of them basketball players who were told to sign up to get in shape. I met with them and told them it was our destiny to demonstrate that we don’t have to be at the bottom of the league, that we can, as a team, be somebody IF they take everything I tell them seriously. “I don’t know any of the students” I explained, “but all of you do. Now go out and grab anyone who you think may be good at running and get them to come out for cross country.” The team rules and regulations were more than 10 pages long. ‘Crazy man’ had arrived and kids love crazy. The object is to make them as crazy as you for the goal in question. Not all that complicated.
They recruited as requested, now we had a small mob of runners but not enough shoes and uniforms and the ones we had were pitiful. “There is no money in the budget”, the Principal informed me, “so do with what you have”. I then sent out a plea for a contribution to all the people I knew spread out over various states. When donations trickled in with checks made out to the the school cross country team the Principal went berserk. He was going to rip up the checks and put me on probation but one of the runners father was on the School Board and raised hell so the checks were cashed and there was no probation. Once again, it was not me, but a school board member who saved the day. I get in hot water and someone bails me out, and friends force the issue. Hard to find anything personal there to brag about.
High School students and college students love to be rebels, to be part of something dynamic and exciting. I designed a cross country course which started and ended at the village dump and the last 3/4 mile was all downhill, so the race really ended at that point and gravity-induced staggering could carry the runner to the finish line. The workouts were long and even on weekends, in part because I wanted them complaining to others how crazy all of it was. More students drifted to the team to be part of the ‘commotion’, even the ‘twins’ noted for their total disinterest in school or any of it’s activities. Now we needed a bus, not a van to get to meets. I made arrangements for the local radio station to interview a different team member once a week. To the runners that was a big deal, even though in reality the only ones listening were parents, relatives, other team members, and a few other students. The Governor was a former cross country star so I managed to get him scheduled to shoot the starting gun at an Invitational meet. Because the Governor was coming, the local TV station agreed to put a camera on a motorbike and televise the race. The Principal again went berserk. “This is not your place to be making arrangements with the Governor’s Office and making TV arrangements. These kind of contacts are to be made by my office” (Of course the Principal would have jumped right to it had I suggested such things to him.) The Governor was a Republican and the local Democrats got riled up and the newspaper headline read: ”The Governor Will Make An Appearance At The Town Dump”. So the Governor backed out and the whole gimmick collapsed, but the team members were irate and this fueled the feeling that the Principal was trying to undercut us any way he could. The runners were driven to believe that effort alone would enable us to prevail. We would smash any hurdle anyone put in front of us. Cross country is not a pressure sport. But at meets it was noticeable which team’s runners were collapsing at the end, vomiting, and some vowing to quit from the experience. One young man exclaimed to no one in particular, “I don’t seem to be having much fun here”. I was young and showing up at several points during the race to tell them how many more of the opponents they had to pass for us to win. Some team members wanted to revolt at the demands, complained to their parents and the parents complained to the Principal about about the effort demanded and the keen competition I encouraged amongst the team runners themselves. Tempers sometimes flared, amongst the various runners and sometimes the team against me. The Principal welcomed the role of sympathizer for anyone who complained. He never understood that some student complaints are a means of bragging about a tough situation. He called me in the office and told me that he runs the school, not me. Huh? He complained that there were more situations with Cross country coming across his desk than with major sports like football. In the past the basketball players would drop out towards the end of the cross country season to concentrate on the upcoming basketball season. But the team was winning and they refused to drop out. The basketball coach complained to the Principal. The Principal would call in individual runners or groups of runners and tell them he would address all the complaints he received from parents and sometimes individual runners. But every time he did this, the team members defended me and complained about the Principal. We finished third in the conference the first year against much larger schools. The kids finally had something to brag about and they did.
When I awarded the Most Valuable Runner Award at the Sports Banquet it went to one of the twins instead of the runner who finished one tenth of a point higher in the calculation formula in the Rules and Regulations print out I distributed at the start of the season. He was class President, the team leader, the hardest worker and his father an important retail store owner in town. The kid’s father raised holy hell with the principal and the Principal seized this opportunity to nail my ass. He promised the father he would bring it up at the next School Board Meeting and get the situation corrected. It took a couple of weeks before the kid would agree to speak to me, and I then explained to him the choice was so close that I had to view it as a tie and was sure, when the dust settled, that he would be on board with it all. I noted this would probably be the first and last time the twin would ever be honored for anything in his life. The twins had been recruited by this runner, so I explained the twin was really his success. The disappointed runner was a sophomore, had many deserved recognitions, and would have many more deserved recognitions (he ended up later in life as the Athletic Director at a large urban high school). I told him I thought both he and I owed it to the twin to let him get some recognition for his success. The next day he went to the Principal and told him he was in full agreement with my decision and would state so if it went to the School Board. His dad never did speak to me again. But he and the twin are friends to this day, and he has commented to me on several occasions how much that trophy has meant to the twin. Maybe I invented ‘fair is fair’ before T.O. To me it was just a way to teach empathy for others different from ourselves. Sometimes ethics demands others count first.
In track I had the runners running up and down the hallways after school in the winter months. The Principal was on the Conference Athletic Board and informed me that it was against the rule for any organized practices before a certain date. I told him they were running on their own. He told me he wasn’t fooled at all, that he knows they hang out in my classroom between their running stints up and down the hallway. So he said they had to stop. I then made a taped phone call to one of the star runners on an opposing team. He went on and on about all the running they were doing off season with workouts designed by the coach. I played it to the Principal and said if he didn’t put a stop to other teams having their runners run over the winter I would issue a formal complaint to the Board. He backed down but made it clear he didn’t appreciate being put on the spot all the time by me. The same runner who missed getting the MVP award in cross country was trying to set the school record in the half mile in track. There was one more meet to go and I advised him not to come to school that morning, sleep in late and just rest so his body will be prepared for a total effort. He did, and set the school record. Unfortunately the Principal called him into his office a couple of weeks later and consoled the student over the fact that he was to have been given an award for perfect school attendance except he missed one morning a couple of weeks ago. “Why did you miss?” asked the Principal. So the student explains I told him to stay home that morning. Oh boy!!!……. “You know”, the Principal shouted at me in his office, “Here academics comes first, not sports. You have no right to tell a student to stay home.” “Well, you are right, of course, but this student is an honors student, very serious about his studies, and missing one morning of school in an attempt to set the school record is hardly going to change his status as a very good and serious student.” Shortly after, my contract was not renewed. The Superintendent told me he felt trapped, that the Principal said it was either him or I, and the Principal would not back off. “You are an excellent teacher and coach he said, you have been good for our students, and very motivational and creative. But he is a good principal and I don’t want him to leave.” I agreed he was a good principal overall but that I can’t coach with all his interference: “He is a control freak.”. So I got fired from my first real job. Back to being a nobody. Who says you can’t go home again?
Getting fired from your first real job is rather devastating to one’s self esteem. How do you ever get a new job? I then knew two things. I had to find a way to protect myself on a job, and I learned my personality was such that it meshed well with students. What seemed like a disaster was not. Not professionally at least, and my resume was filled with overkill in praise from students and fellow teachers.
I then decided to go back to the Univ, of Wisconsin and get a Ph.D. My youthful obsession with track had to go. I met with Dr. Youmans, the head of the Department of Physiology at the Medical School, Univ. of Wisconsin. He was an impressive guy with a wry sense of humor and huge intellect. He would give consideration to my request. In the mean time I applied for and got a job teaching physiology to nurses at Northwestern Univ. The resume did the trick. Their Nursing Program was a unique one in that it was run entirely out of Evanston Hospital with the nurses housed in dorm rooms at the hospital complex. The Chairperson told me that she was impressed by my resume endorsements and the student committee interview went well since they unanimously chose me as their favorite. I went back and told Dr. Youmans that I was offered a job and was uncertain what to do. “You are”, he said, “difficult to figure out. I have talked to others around here about you and you have strong backers and some not so strong. You appear to be a good teacher, but not so good at research. We had three sessions to talk and we talked about a lot of things. He then did the unthinkable. He would re-admit me to the Ph.D. program and take me at my word that teaching would be my goal more so than research. Furthermore, he advised me to take the job in Illinois and he would let me do my research thesis off campus. Do something involving exercise physiology he stated, do your research down there, and I will push this thing through if you can pass the Ph.D. oral exam. Huh? Another example of someone pushing me to the top for hard to understand reasons. Nobody gets to do a research thesis off campus. Well at that point I was once again a nobody being pushed forward by a somebody. An important somebody.
The job at Northwestern University, teaching in a Hospital Nursing Program, started out as a pleasant lark. For three years in a row I was elected ‘Outstanding Teacher’ by the nursing students. I was also quickly made the unofficial Assistant Chair to the Department Chairperson. She was a flighty kind of gal but dead serious about everything and hell bent on her career advancement. I was both busy and having fun at the same time. Working on my Ph.D thesis was a royal pain, and the damn thing was nothing to brag about and it was going to depend on whether Dr. Youmans was serious about me concentrating on teaching and ignore research. When I went back for my Oral exam for the Ph.D. I was incredibly nervous. I drank a little, and then some, to calm me down. When I stumbled on a major kidney process Dr. Youmans bailed me out remarking that I wasn’t expected to know everything, that maybe Dr. Hendricks, who taught the kidney portion of the courses I took, was not clear enough on this process. He smiled but Dr. Hendricks did not seem amused. Chairpersons have a lot of power and Youmans ran the Department with an iron fist. What he saw in me I have no idea. But the others got the clear impression that he expected me to pass this exam. Maybe I really did, maybe I didn’t. I know I didn’t feel I was up to par for that exam.
Back at the hospital things just kept rolling along. The students were full of energy and responded well to my personality. They pushed for a Christmas Party and I held one at my apartment. While faculty were invited and came, the students stayed half the night and many were well oiled up with liquor. I spent a good deal of time keeping out stray young men who witnessed from the street all these female nursing students crowded in an apartment partying; naturally they tried to crash the party. I could ill afford to let that happen. The Chairperson the next day told me ‘No more parties, the students were getting out of control and stayed too long.” I took the students to the race track one day and it was just my luck to have some reporter from the Chicago Tribune run a picture and short article about the nursing students at the race track. Not all the faculty were impressed. The students pressured me to be in some School Christmas party skit. That is not my bag at all. But I said ok. The trouble was I went out before the party to dinner with some faculty and the Chairperson and drank too much. Maybe on purpose, I did’t want to be on stage. It was some kind of stupid comedy skit about student nurse social lives and I played loose with the part and I guess embarrassed one of the most ‘revered faculty’ members with my behavior as her lover in the skit. I had to write a public letter of apology to all the faculty and students. That was going to be it for after school shenanigans. They are too risky. And I am too unpredictable. Perhaps there is a less polite and more accurate term.
I wrote a grant and got financial support from a well known foundation (The Clement Stone Foundation) to establish a program called the Evanston Hospital Health Careers Program. I was proud of that program because the total cost was a mere $10,000 per year. No one got paid except the Coordinator and he only $5000 a year. As the Director of the Program I did not get paid. The idea was simple but intriguing. I had Chicago and Chicago area high school teachers nominate students who seemed to have academic potential but were not racking up good grades. These students would come to the Hospital one afternoon a week and be interns in various medical departments to see what goes on in differing departments. I spoke to various departments in the hospital and had no trouble getting someone in the department to work up an internship experience for these students. I then hired a co-ordinator solely based on his personality to light a fire under these students. The guy only had a GED high school diploma and I met him in a nightclub. I knew right away the high school students would respond well to him. So the program was launched. Things went smoothly. Some of the high school teachers wanted to present the program on a national level. The enrolled high school students, with few exceptions, improved their grades. My only contact with the students was introductory interviews, and periodic individual conferences to monitor their progress.
Well, the program was too simple for many of the nursing faculty and the Chairperson. Why weren’t they involved with these students (with a salary perk of course) and why would I hire someone with a GED to be the co-ordinator? I asked them why did faculty think they could reach these students when their high school teachers could not? Also, the coordinator was not teaching them anything. He just set up time and dates for the experiences, got the students to the right place, retrieved them at the appropriate time, and simply proctored some basic tests they took to try and match a career with their talents. None of the students and none of the department personnel giving the experiences were complaining about the coordinator. I was asked by my Chairperson to dismiss him and hire a more professional person. What professional well educated person is going to accept a job as chauffeur to get the high school students to and from their experiences? It is very tricky to find the kind of person who can relate to and motivate the kind of high school students involved. My department head then accused him of stealing a purse and when that was proven totally false, she acted as if some maniac was loose running all over the hospital. How do I fire someone who is doing a good job? So I didn’t. I should have seen it coming after the stint at the high school, but I didn’t, and got a letter saying my contract would not be renewed. But this was not high school and all hell broke loose. The student nurses were enraged, the Clement Stone Foundation threatened to cancel much bigger grants to Northwestern and the Hospital, the high school teachers sent letters of support, while I was just paralyzed by being in such a spotlight and under attack. I did nothing myself to defend me. A hearing was held with a committee of administrators from the Hospital, Northwestern Univ, and my Department Head.
The President of the Hospital appointed his Vice President for Planning to represent him at the hearing. He began to request I go with him on several excursions he made to luncheons and meetings, clearly having been told to figure out who the hell I was and why all the commotion. He was surprisingly some sort of hippyish character who found me a companion rebel. “We will take down these ‘bastards’ “ he told me on the second meeting. At the hearing I was a scared rabbit. My department Chairperson defended her action by saying she never had approved hiring the Coordinator of the Program. But the Director of Personnel presented a copy of the hiring form which she had signed. My Chairperson asked me “Where did you meet this guy?” The Vice President of the Hospital intervened sharply at this point. “The President wants this matter settled immediately, and he dumped a huge box of letters supporting me on the table. This has to stop and is creating a bad image for the Hospital. It doesn’t make any difference where he met this person, I met our President at a cocktail party, am I to be fired? What is going on here is personal and unprofessional. The President wants Dr. James removed from the Nursing Department and be under the direct supervision of the Director of Personnel. His office will be in the Administration Building and for his own good, the current Coordinator will be found a new job at another hospital, which the Director of Personnel will make happen. He will be replaced by a Secretary given to Dr. James to coordinate the activities of these high school students. The Clement Stone Foundation has been given assurance that the Program will continue and Dr. James well remain in charge of this program.” Is everybody on board with this solution?” No one opposed it. I should have opposed it. Too weak and petrified, not strong enough. What kind of person lets another person take the fall as long as his own job is saved? It is not the kind of thing for which we can forgive ourselves. It becomes a life-long albatross.
It was not my finest moment. Somebody lost their job even though not a single person with whom he worked complained about him. And it got worse. Several faculty who supported me found their jobs eliminated and they were sent packing. I hardly needed a plush office in the Administrative Building or a secretary. Some people who supported me lost their job. It was time to search for another job. Being somebody was problematic for someone like me. The senior nursing students elected me to give the commencement address. I declined, it seemed inappropriate for several people to lose their jobs and I prance around on a stage giving a commencement address.
This is going to stop now because of length. A position at UCLA fell through at the last moment when the Governor froze all hirings at the State Universities. At the last minute I took a position at a brand new built University on the South Side of Chicago. I only planned to stay a year, but got caught up in the challenge of dealing with a majority black population at the height of the turbulent sixties and seventies. I was there for 25 years. Was it a good decision to stay? Hard to say. The complexities and hurdles the Institution faced were a real challenge to me. They proved to be too much too often too long for the University to ever succeed in the long run. The story of its struggles and it’s eventual decline was intriguing theatre at it’s best and tragedy at it’s worst. At a top University, students can pass no matter how good or how poor a teacher is. If a faculty member is good at research they stay. Fair enough. At this University where I taught the passing rate in the courses I taught was around 25%, and that achievement required endless interaction with students who often came from the worst high schools, neighborhoods, and difficult family situations. But if teaching was my thing, the satisfaction of having made a real difference in student lives was maximized. Most University Professors lead a relatively dull professional existence and are pretty much secluded in their lab work. The research work they do is extremely valuable for the most part. My situation was stressful, intense, with absurd hours working spent on individual students with so many ‘crazy’ problems, often having to do with their situations outside of class. My experience there is simply too long for a musing, and now that I am retired, it is best to let it all go and I have. I was eager towards the end to return to a life of being a nobody. For twenty years of retirement I have been just that. It has been a perfect circle for me, to go from nobody to somebody and then back to nobody in retirement. There are lessons to be learned here despite drawn from my own peculiar life. Everyone has a story to tell and is a unique personality. Diversity is the driving force for God’s evolutionary process. That I learned to appreciate diversity made my life intense plus challenging, and in the end made it possible for a high degree of contentment in my terminational years. Since my retirement that University simply imploded on itself and no longer serves well the population it was built to serve. In some sense our whole country, indeed the whole world may well be drifting down the same path. I have seen this kind of show during my productive stage of life. Once is enough. I know in the end Mother Nature will make necessary corrections and in due course, in evolutionary years, progress will continue, as it has always continued, but in ways none of us could possibly imagine—anymore than Lincoln himself could have imagined this world 150 years after his death.
This musing was written to illustrate, via my own life, the Golden Rule as the universal ethical principle in human existence. There are precious few people who have enough genetic will power and focus to achieve becoming somebody on their own. That is why I admire Terrell Owens. Even that comes with downsides as Terrell Owens found out from neglect of other aspects of his life. Being somebody though, is no guarantee for contentment. With the Golden Rule the giver and the receiver are rewarded, both achieving additional contentment in their lives. The sad crime is that we rarely acknowledge sufficiently those who help make us somebody instead of a nobody. None of the key people, with the exception of my high school track coach, have ever been properly thanked for their help at key points in my life. There is guilt here and there should be. There ought to be a new holiday—one in which we feel obligated to say thanks again to those non-genetically related people who played such an important role in enabling many of us to become some sort of somebody instead of a nobody. Perhaps we could call it “Befriendor Day” and have it exclude any genetic relations. The value of such a day would be a kind of motivation for us to be sure our phone or mailbox were not inactive on this holiday. It would serve as a yearly reminder of how well we are living an ethical life. All of us can befriend others beside our genetic clan, via our time or our money or both, at any age, in any culture, in any profession.
There were occasions when a student or non student would ask me “Why are you helping me?”. I would dismiss it off the cuff with “because I am paid to help you’”. That was disingenuous. I was paid to teach physiology and as long as I did that my salary was safe. But this is a disingenuous comment too. We all seek contentment. Money, titles, power, fame, sex, and so on are temporary pleasures and run the risk of addictive compulsive behaviors—and these never lead to maximum contentment in the absence of the Golden Rule. We all need to balance these temporary, albeit important pleasures, with understanding when enough is enough, and live our lives, as best we can via the Golden Rule. Then we can sit back, in my case, late at night or in a nature setting, and feel a degree of contentment. The Golden Rule is win/win for both those who give and those who receive.
I also learned that we spend too much time not doing the right thing for fear of reprisals from administrators. The truth is, if what we do is the right thing for the target of our actions, and we ourselves will not gain any monetary gain or titles or personal advancement from our actions, then some administrator somewhere in the hierarchy will have the power to protect us, and will. And if they can’t, it is not true that we can never be hired again for having been dismissed. Colleagues and others involved in the past job will write letters of recommendation that will exaggerate our personal qualities and make us look like the perfect fit for a new job. Often when I showed up for an interview the person would comment to the effect, “your recommendations were a bit over the top so I have been looking forward to this interview.” If we are doing the right thing for those involved in our job, then this fear of reprisal from an administrator is over blown. However, I admit, it is easier to run the risk when single than when married with family. Family obligations do generate a certain obligatory caution. It was one thing for me to stay on the campus until the last person who wanted to see me, did. Students, in essence, were my family, whereas a married person finds their biological family required a lot of their time. So things can get complicated. That’s life and that’s why, for me, retirement was the chance to un-complicate my life. And I have. The Golden Rule stills rules as the core of my ethical bent, but these days it is done almost exclusively via my FANAFI Fund (Find A Need And Fill It). The days are pretty much done when I have any direct involvement with the less fortunate except via these grants, which are far more than I spend on myself. God Bless retirement.
For many years it seemed so odd that so many people distant to me would intercede and protect me or push me forward out of the blue. I called it luck, and maybe that is more the answer than not. There is a part of me now that prefers to think these people, especially in my productive years, saw that whatever I was or was not, a lot of people were given hope, a second chance, a push forward in their lives who otherwise would have been destroyed by a system that was too inflexible, too wrapped up in rules, too blindsided by authority, by appearance, by custom, by fear of creativity, by racial bias, and a willingness to let some suffer in order to to keep all the pins lined up in order, less there be disorder and through their inability to keep order, lose their job. Good people succumb to this all the time. I don’t see people in terms of evil vs good, the Devil vs God at all. What I do see are diverse human beings struggling in an evolutionary time period, a period in need of continued evolution. If everything was perfect, what need would there be for any evolutionary process? Once I spent an entire evening pondering the saddest thing I have ever seen in life. I concluded that nothing is sadder than looking into the eyes of a young person and realize—they are at the end of their rope, hope is gone, and no light do they see at the end of the tunnel, nothing but a nobody who will never be anybody—-living a life of quiet desperation. Nothing is sadder in life than that. That is when somebody needs to intercede, no matter the time consumed, the endless effort required, the odds against success, or the genetic makeup of the nobody in question. We reach out because we are selfish, we don’t want to be filled with guilt, but to achieve some contentment if we can befriend them in their time of need. Not complicated, just difficult. We always need to at least try. Retirement will be time enough to rest.
Finally, honesty dictates a feeling that it was easier for an administrator to appreciate any strengths of mine from a distance. I suppose the world will always need some loose cannons around to generate some needed help for the hapless/defenseless, but the immediate supervisor of such a loose cannon ends up dealing with the waves created—and this is time consuming. Some administrators can handle this better than others. My favorite administrator could handle the likes of me with calm amusement. Whenever a student, administrator, colleague or whoever charged into her office in a rage about something involving my actions, she would smile and say something like “Relax, I have to deal with him everyday. State your case, but I am not going to act on anything for a month. I know he stirs things up, but if I spend time setting up a hearing, or meetings about it, or getting input from others, by the time it is time to finalize actions, those upset invariably change their mind, back off, and say things are just perfect now, that things have been worked out. I don’t understand many things he does or how he does them, but he seems to make it work out ok if we give him some slack. Now if you would like me to appoint you to be the person who oversees him on a daily basis I will be happy to do so.” Then she would just laugh. Afterwards she would likely call me and say, “For Christ sake Reid, so and so is furious with you, I let you do things your way, now you solve this problem your way. I prefer not to hear anymore about it. You get this problem off my desk. Just keep me informed as to any progress you make.” I really liked her. Fortunately she was the Chairperson of the Department when I arrived and remained so until I was tenured and promoted, which occurred early on because she told me “You are good for our students but I don’t trust you to keep enough faculty and administrators on your side to get you promoted and tenured down the road. It best I push it through right now.” I will always bless her for her kindness and support. Almost all these ‘special angels’ are dead now, and Father Time will deal with me like he deals with all the elderly. We can often dodge many bullets in life, but not very well in our Terminational years. We do what we can to make these years pleasant and contented, knowing full well the day will come when an insurmountable medical derangement will take us down. And when that time comes, if we are lucky, we will be able to control our own dying process and make that final ‘enough is enough’ decision. I now eagerly look forward to musing topics which do not depend so many revelations about my own personal life. As always, enough is enough.
It took a lifetime, hundreds of musings, thousands of students, administrators, pets, valuable boyhood friends, a special ‘best friend’, colleagues, interesting strangers and a long list of ‘saviors’ in my life for me to fully understand the significance of the Golden Rule. We cannot create contentment for ourselves until we make an equal effort to help others, especially those most in need of support, to achieve some success in their lives——for only when contentment in any society is maximized to include the maximum number of others, can contentment become maximized for that society. As probably expected, I end this kind of musing with my favorite quotation:
“There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it’s natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it’s got to be cherished and if we think like that, and live that kind of life, we can all have our freedom, we can all have our happiness, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation.” (Unknown)
I look at the quotation above and sense Obama would love it too. The polls show he now gets a high rating in polls. So how does a populace at the same time give him high marks and then turn around and elect Donald Trump? I sense Trump would find this quotation pure gibberish, unable to relate to it at all. My guess is that with the whole world in economic turmoil in terms of distribution of wealth, people vote out of desperation, just to blow everything up and see what happens. This is quite a risk. It will be interesting.
