ONE DAY IT WILL BE WRIT, "AMERICA, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR CHILDREN?"

ONE DAY IT WILL BE WRIT, “AMERICA, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR CHILDREN?”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 26, 2012

David Brooks, New York Times columnist, and Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and also a New York Times columnist have pieces on the opinion page today of the Tampa Bay Times (February 26, 2012).  Brooks writes about “America is Europe,” and Krugman writes on Mitt Romney “A Keynesian in the closet.”

Brooks contends that our social welfare system is just as great if not greater than Europe’s in his column, but much of it is hidden so we don’t see it.

Krugman insists that Mitt Romney is very much a Keynesian liberal while purporting to be a fiscal conservative.  He harps on Romney’s answer to someone in Michigan while campaigning, saying, “If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you can spending, you’ll slow down the economy.” 

A-ha, the Nobel Laureate says, that is right out of the Keynesian playbook, which holds that full employment and a stable economy depend on the continued governmental stimulation of spending and investment through adjustment of interest rates, deficit financing and the like. 

We have been doing that for at least the last eighty years, and without a defensive war (WWII), stupid war (Vietnam) or preemptive wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), all of which are artificial stimulants to the economy, and ultimately come to haunt the republic in mounting deficits, we might see ourselves as little better off than Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece today, nations staring bankruptcy in the face.

Brooks implies the American economy is self-deluding, while Krugman insists Mitt Romney is insincere if not mendacious.

From my view, it is pretty obvious both are right as we have programmed ourselves and our children not to be prepared to face our own respective natures much less the world we have created and are now forced to live in.  Mendacity has become the stick that stirs our collective drink.

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We became intoxicated with this drink when social engineers, social, educational and child psychologists of the 1930s thought they had discovered the magic bullet.  Children suffered from low self-esteem and workers suffered from inattentive bosses.  I have written volumes on this subject, suffice me to say here they essentially killed initiative and truth for ordinary souls, which includes most of us.

It was not always so.  I write this in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (soon to be published) in a chapter called “Watershed Moments.”  It represents an internal dialogue in which Seamus “Dirk” Devlin writes to his eldest son, Robbie, who at the time is nine, as part of his inheritance when he dies:

After my fifth birthday, we were a family for the first time with my mother and father seemingly materializing out of nowhere, living in this little house at 1931 Roosevelt Street.  It became a watershed moment when I attended Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School in the fall in this dirty industrial river town of Crescent City on the Mississippi River. Perhaps because of that experience, one never knows, I’ve had affection for the smell, the grime and chaos of the city but disaffection with authority as this watershed moment left me with minor scars, but learning scars nonetheless.

           

There I was toward the end of first grade standing before the principal and my teacher with my parents at my side.  They came as the result of a letter claiming this mandatory meeting was of the “utmost importance for the future of your son.” 

My da reacted as if he were stabbed when my mother told him the purpose of the meeting.  He yelled at the top of his lungs, “What the shit is this all about?  I don’t have any goddamn time for this!”  The fact is he had a lot of time.  He didn’t have a job.  World War Two was on but he was still looking for a job.  My mother smoked in silence, finally saying, “We will honor the summons, Seamus.”  I had the same given name as my da although most people called him Duncan, a nickname.

They accompanied me the three blocks to the school from our rented home on Roosevelt Street.  No one said a word walking to the school, as they were both quietly smoking.  I remember the face of the principal and teacher.  They looked like two porcelain plates with painted smiles.  The teacher stood.  The principal sat.  He spoke. 

“Your son must repeat the first grade,” he said evenly, “He cannot seem to manage the work.  We think this best socially and academically.  We didn’t want you to learn this from a report card.”

My da sprung from his chair, equipped with a seventh grade education, ready to bolt, but my mother put her hand on his shoulder and gently guided him back into his chair.  “What do you mean exactly when you say he cannot do the work, or that he’s not,” she struggled for words, “socially adjusted?” She then said almost in a whisper, “Could you be more specific?”

This seemed to ease the tension in the principal’s face.  He then explained in some detail my failure to learn to read, to do simple arithmetic, to participate in class, to play games with other children.  He gave examples of my limited social skills, and resistance to any type of encouragement. 

“So you’re saying my kid is stupid?” my da said with fire in his eyes.  He turned to my mother, “just like his old man, right?”  She ignored the cut.

“You ask if he is stupid, no, he is not stupid.  Is he slow?  We are not even certain of that.  What is clearly evident is that he is not here.  Because he is not here he has not been teachable.  I’m sorry.  If you cannot read, or won’t read, you will be severely handicapped in the second grade and beyond.  That is our concern.”  My teacher said nothing, only nodded in agreement. 

It was as if the schoolhouse of brick and mortar fell on my da’s head, and killed his spirit.  He had no fight.  He slumped in defeat.  Neither parent protested.  Their son had failed.  They knew a lot about failure.  When the teacher offered to demonstrate my incompetence, both parents threw their hands up in surrender, and shook their heads wildly from side to side.  It was too ugly.

Then the cruelest moment of my life occurred.  The teacher despite their protest handed me a Dick and Jane reader, and said, “Read this, Seamus, pointing to a page with Dick and Jane in happy animation running with their dog, Spot.  I didn’t read, although the rhythm of the happy picture danced in my head, Dick, See Dick.  See Dick run.  Run Dick run.  Jane. See Jane.  See Jane run. Run Jane run.  Spot. See Spot.  See Spot run.  Run Spot run.  It was like silent music that caused me to smile, and then frown when I saw all the horror in their collective eyes. 

Silence stormed the room like a chilling spike.  It was a fait accompli.  Teacher and principal looked at each other, then at my parents raising and lowering their eyebrows like fluttering curtains.  The teacher drove the chilling spike into my parents’ heart.  “It is for the best,” she said levelly.

My da never got over that setback.  It dogged him for the rest of his short life.  My mother accepted it as only a workable problem.  She would dedicate herself to first repair the damage by seeing that I learned to read by lifting the shadow from my private sanctuary, and then by going one step further to make me a reader, like herself.  She could easily manage a book a day. 

It was that day, she told me several years later that she was going to make me special, to demand the world take notice.  School became my temple and knowledge my God.

Several years later, I found myself in another watershed moment when I flunked out of medical school.  Medical school wasn’t my first, second or third choice as a career, but it was my da’s only choice.  He revered doctors who had been his boyhood friends from the other side of the tracks. 

My first choice was to become a Roman Catholic priest.  It was also my mother’s first choice.  She and I often talked about the career I would have.  We could see me in the red lined cape of a monsignor, and then the red cassock and white surplice of a bishop, and perhaps one day even a Doctor of the Church as a Cardinal. 

My second choice was to be a professional baseball player.  I was a good all-around athlete and not great in any sport, but more proficient in baseball and basketball than any other.  I was a catcher in baseball, the easiest position to make it in professional baseball.  Although a position I loved with masochistic zeal, so brutally demanding is the position, I couldn’t hit for average, and had only an adequate throwing arm.  Where I excelled was in handling pitchers as a defensive backstop and hitting the long ball. 

My third choice was to be a moral philosopher and artist and write books on how I experienced life.  From my earliest recollections, I loved being me.  One becomes what one is, and that is why everything that I’ve written over the decades is an uninhibited self-presentation of boundless self-mirroring.  In truth, it is because I’ve always treated myself as a laboratory, as far back as that fateful meeting at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary when I was six.

If my flunking first grade gutted my da, my flunking out of medical school killed him.  Medicine is what he wanted for me because he could see it as a way to feel his life had not been lived in vain.  Technically, he died of a rare blood disease, multiple myeloma, but his spirit died sixteen years before, after that failure.  Already down, the body couldn’t get up from the canvas after the second failure.  He died three days after his fiftieth birthday, wasting away, a five-seven man of 165 pounds reduced to one of 60 pounds when he perished.

This watershed moment might never have occurred had I not listened to my heart.  I liked the hygienic purity of science taught with the certainty of medieval religion, and excelled in it for that reason.  It found me graduating with Cum Laude honors with BSCE and MSC degrees before entering medical school, along with Phi Eta Sigma (freshman honorary), Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership honorary), Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic honorary), and Phi Kappa Phi (graduate honorary) keys.  So, why this failure in medicine?

The picture and sound were wrong.  Life is beauty and its music is a combination of visual perception and audible patterns.  Such imagery came to me in nonaligned ways.  It was natural for me to be ambiguous and unpredictable, to go against the grain like a chemical equation in reverse or a chimerical image born of imagination. 

Chemistry, physics and mathematics were my entertainment, but my heart was in liberal arts: Greek and Latin, English literature, Roman Catholic and European history, the American novel, American poetry, philosophy of religion, history of ideas.  Greek and Shakespearean dramas were squeezed in as electives that made me eligible for a Phi Beta Kappa key.

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GREEN ISLAND is only novel but is meant to put the light on a troubled young man and his family in an even more troubled country, South Africa, at a time, 1968, Devlin calls, “The end of the American Century a little early.”  Devlin is confounded by all the artificial filters that have been concocted by society that prevent him from seeing reality, and so he bares his soul in writing as a catharsis.   

We preach equality when we know no such thing exists.  We can have equal opportunity, but we are not all equal, never were or never will be. 

We cannot make up the difference by giving everyone in kindergarten a ribbon of excellence when few are, but we can encourage others to strive for the excellence with which they are capable. 

We cannot all be leaders because few of us have the will, the determination or the instincts to lead, but we can be followers of what is right and good and true, and in that sense demonstrate leadership of the most rarest kind. 

We can’t all be doctors, lawyers or engineers, what’s more we are unlikely to want to be those things, but we can find our niche by listening to our own heart and pursuing what interests us, as there is no job or career or livelihood superior to another.  The key question: Does the life’s work I have chosen bring me happiness?  Evidence that it does is the happiness enjoyed by those around you.

Darwin was right.  Life is about the survival of the fittest, but the fittest can be nearly everyone if they are not afraid of pain, and will suck it up to ultimately realize their pleasure and potential in some kind of work; if they are not afraid of failure, as failure is the best teacher on the road to success; if they are not afraid of struggle, as life is struggle from birth to death, and to deny it is to deny life itself; if they are not afraid of stress, because without stress there is no life, but distress which can be avoided by taking life seriously and not ourselves, then meeting life’s challenges head on, whatever they are. 

In my novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: Memoir of The 1940s Written As A Novel (2003), I write:

“It was a time (1940s) when kids created their own play, as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind.  Clinton (Iowa) youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom or its concomitant brutality again.  This is not a history of the times, nor is it a novel in the conventional sense, but rather recollections of a time, place and circumstance through the author’s self-confessed imperfect vision.  In the Shadow of the Courthouse promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.”

My sense from Brooks and Krugman is that child has instead but put on Ritalin.

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