LETTER TO RACHEL

LETTER TO RACHEL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 12, 2010

REFERENCE: The last letter posted on my blog as a “Letter to Rachel” was December 1, 2009. Many others were posted from when she was a little girl. Over the years, I have given the reader a glimpse into our conversations and relationship. Now, she is a high school freshman, established scholar and athlete with a fine mind on a five-ten plus frame at age fourteen.

Like her grandfather, she has grown so fast at an early age that she is a bit awkward. I was as well at her age, knocking over things, and invariably getting into trouble. In anticipation of that possibility – last time she visited she baptized my new TIME magazine with coffee - I warned her to stay clear of her mother’s coffee cup.

This hurt her feelings. I didn’t apologize. I am apologizing now, and sharing a conversation we had when we were in the house alone, together. Those who remember those “Letters to Rachel” may also remember that I’ve never talked down to her at any age. As a consequence, she has taught me far more than I have taught her.

* * *

MY DEAR RACHEL

First of all, I want to apologize for being such a poop. In no way did you deserve for me to heighten your anxiety by making you feel guilty of "before the fact" of spilling your mother's coffee when, in fact, she had not yet drank it.

That said I want to return to a conversation we had. We talked about winners and losers hanging together, about how losers are "morphed" into "cookie cutter" identities (your expression to which I agree), hanging out going nowhere with no motivation to change their status.

Well, winners are "morphed" into "cookie cutter" identities as well. The danger is for winners and losers to remain isolated from each other and "never the twain shall meet."

As I said in a recent missive, we see too much of that disposition in government. I wrote in that piece that the "experts" around the President of the United States had no experience running a small business, experiencing foreclosures, being made redundant, and so on, but yet they advised the president as if they had.

Such "experts" come to "think" they have answers for others when they have no experience living hand to mouth. They attempt to create schemes without checking to find out what these people think and feel is needed. They "think" they know. On the strength of that knowledge, they create policies in ignorance because they don't know. They can't know. They haven't been there.

* * *

I shared with you why I was a successful consultant. A company would pay me a handsome fee to check out what was wrong with its operation. I would go into the organization and interview people in the trenches to see what they thought. Then I would ask them what they thought should be done.

This information would be correlated, conceptualized into digestible morsels for top management outlining a course of action. Management would file the report, write me a check, and then happily do nothing other than report it to the Board of Directors as a management sponsored intervention.

* * *

I shared this with you because you feel somewhat ambivalent toward William Golding's first novel, LORD OF THE FLIES (1954), which is part of your summer reading for school.

As powerful as this little novel is, and as popular as it was with the general reader of the time, it was not considered serious literature by those "morphed" and "cookie cutter" critics of the intelligentsia.

The book was then and is now a parody of society. The title is a reference to the Hebrew word for Satan, Beelzebub, which I'm sure you know, or "god of the flies."

Golding imagined what might happen if a group of teenagers your age survived a plane crash but no adults did, and the survivors were isolated on an island from "civilization."

The author posed these questions:

(1) What is human nature?

(2) How are individuals likely to behave when separated from their acculturated social guidance system?

(3) Will they rally to support the general welfare of the common good?

(4) Or will they divide and conquer with what I have come to call "personhood"?

These are relevant questions today. We have abandoned the common good in many instances vying for an amoral, self-indulgent personhood exemplified in the "me" generation of the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, we have thrown many cultural iconic myths aside "to do our own thing."

The book was prescient in that it anticipated this breakdown of norms after World War Two.

When I was a boy your age some sixty years ago, there was the common belief that the common good was instinctive, that you could count on people in dire circumstances no matter what to rally in mutual communal support of each other. Golding, a trained social thinker, wasn't so sure.

Your papa was younger than you are now when World War Two was raging. A steady diet of war has continued throughout his life, and now that diet embraces yours. The shadow of the atomic bomb and the possibility of societal conflagration leading to the annihilation of man on earth now embrace your generation as it first embraced mine those many years ago.

I don't remember LORD OF THE FLIES in detail but I do remember that two fair-haired boys emerged to be dominant, creating separate identities and myths to establish control. A kind of ruthlessness develops to enforce that control with a microcosm of society based on fear and retribution.

The two groups have spies, enforcers and so on. Before you were born, it seemed inevitable that one day the United States and the Soviet Union would be engaged in nuclear holocaust. In 1954, the COLD WAR was a very real threat to the stability of this small planet when Golding wrote this book.

Not all novels, nor should they, have such a powerful theme in telling a story. But as you grow up and take your place in the world, you will find yourself returning to such books as this. They are parodies for what you will be experiencing.

I'm going to reread LORD OF THE FLIES when I finish the book I'm now reading. Perhaps we could discuss it in a little seminar where your papa promises to behave better.

I love you very much, as you know, and am very proud of you,

PAPA