James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2012
REFERENCE:
A story has circulated on the web; a story I’m told is not new, a story with no clear reference to its authenticity, but a story nonetheless heartrending. It is a story of a boy congenially limited who is shown empathy by a group of boys playing baseball. They invite him to play with them.
The father tells the story. This makes it suspect for me as the parental presence, or the authority figure implies empathic behavior is exceptional rather than common among the young. I segue beyond this to suggest such caring was not rare when I was young, as individualism was its own critic and managed its own criteria with little intrusion from the adult world.
What Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” was ordinary kids used to thinking for themselves with a natural camaraderie that was not the product of programmed regimentation. These ordinary G.I.’s won WWII.
Play for that generation, as kids, was self-organized around common interests with creative sorting out what they would do. That was the generation of the 1940s. Once the war was over, the retreat from individualism commenced with experts dictating the programming. It is why the Shay story seems exceptional today, and why the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1968) is the least adult and most regimented society in American history. Its prototype is the technocrat.
Before WWII, leaders rose quietly, inauspiciously with little inclination for show, but with competence. “Quiet Hero” (2011) reviewed on these pages was about Ken Ploen, an athlete and scholar who epitomized the pre-baby boomer generation. His kind was not rare in kindness or empathy. I had the privilege of knowing him and playing athletics with him at the dawn of his career. He rose out of common ground born in a place called “Lost Nation, Iowa.”
We have lost that individualism and quiet heroism, and have become a regimented society where someone else calls all the plays with us expected to perform on cue. As a consequence, we muddle forward in a leaderless society. Our programmed regimentation has turned us away from being strategic thinkers to tacticians implementing someone else’s ideas.
HEARTS AND NOSTALGIA
This story is printed in large colored boldface letters, which I found to be a turnoff. I felt empathy for the boy, as have other respondents. What follows is my comments on the Shay story shared with my e-mailers, followed by three reactions to the story with my comments to follow. You sense from this exchange the mood and mind of persons of a certain age and experience.
DR. FISHER COMMENTS ON SHAY STORY
This is a touching story. I think most readers know many versions of it. Being handicapped as this youngster was, then experiencing that moment of joy, is one dimension of the wider problem of acceptance. We have drifted from self-acceptance to the wider need of group identity, association and group acceptance. Obviously, this is important but as complement to, not a substitute for self-acceptance.
A story in my memoir as a novel, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003) has John Knoerschild, a child prodigy and piano genius, not being able to catch a softball even thrown softly underhand.
He would put up his hands as if the ball would hit him. Once taught to catch the ball like a three-year-old, and he was already nine, he still never came to bat at recess, but took joy in that accomplishment.
In my era, the Shay story would not be unusual. We had little choice other than to fend for ourselves, to be individuals, as we made up our own play, didn't have parental supervision, didn't have Little League or fancy uniforms, didn't have so many competing stimuli telling us what we were, should be, should do, and what disadvantages we had. We were allowed to be kids.
There was a lot of kindness, and yes, crudeness, too, in that arena, but I can safely say that everyone eventually drifted to a suitable niche, and were accepted in that niche. We weren’t heavy into psychobabble or causes, and therefore had little acquaintance with complaint. It was what it was.
John was an exception. He was light years ahead of us in the classroom. We respected him for that. I made it my business to walk home from school with him many nights just to soak up some of his wonder.
He was a delight, irreverent, and sparkled so much in the classroom with his banter with Sister Mary Cecile that I still remember their exchanges with affection.
Shay didn't have the chance to develop into an extreme. He was born as one.
I often wondered what happened to John who was either pushed or prodded into the extreme that he was. I can't believe that rare intelligence does not have the possibility of a counterbalance in physicality.
Often today, young people are pushed and prodded into extremes for advantage by well meaning parents, who don't realize how much life is made up and learned as we go along. Not given that chance or that experience contempt can come out in ways mentioned in the preface to the Shay story.
You may think I am painting an idealistic picture for how Shay might have been treated in my day. We were much less self-conscious, much less into do or die winning, much more into just enjoying being kids. Regimentation has taken the fun out of being young.
I was watching teams competing in the "Little League World Series," players who have the batting gloves, uniforms, all the moves and peccadilloes of Major Leaguers.
The baseball diamonds are immaculate, everything precise and according to code. It is the showplace for adults with kids as the actors in their play. And we wonder why there are no grown-ups today! Sad.
COMMENT NUMBER ONE
Jim,
You are correct. Back when we were kids, we just played and we did not really cut out those who were "not like us," at least until high school when peer pressure kicked in. One such girl now remembers me as being the only person who was kind to her, but I do not remember being so. I guess I was, I hope so, and if so, I am glad I was. Kids can be cruel.
She was very poor and dressed poorly and was not able (or did not) wash well so she frequently smelled. Sad. Now she is a bank teller and very happy.
Peace,
Mary
COMMENT NUMBER TWO
Jim,
Just not the old sandlot days of in the shadow of the courthouse or Clinton Corn field at the end of 18th Avenue South, is it? I am so glad Little League hadn't been invented in our days. Let the kids play ball, they'll get by....
gfk
COMMENT NUMBER THREE
Hi Jim,
This is a nice story likely intended to demonstrate a type of humanity we have as children and lose as adults.
It did put a lump in my throat about ten years ago when I was copied on one of its early runs through the internet. The earliest telling I could find was by Rabbi Peach Kroch (1999). The tale was penned into a song published in 2001.
There is no way to learn whether this is a true story. If you told it to a group of kids, maybe even those in the Little League World Series, they might shrug and say, "Yeah, and what's your point?"
They understand it's a game meant to be fun for all. There may be teasing and razzing but it's part of the fun. I remember being called the strikeout king until second grade when I got glasses and could finally see the ball. Picked last but still in the game.
You, in Tampa, are currently in the middle of one of the more inhumane political campaigns many of us have ever seen. Shay or Shaya, as he was called in the Rabbi's parable, would end up jetsam in the gutter. No place for the weak or faint of heart. The middle will move to Charlotte in a couple of weeks.
On one hand, this brief slice of life could be used to indict those who claim to be he party of Christianity yet believe the sick, if poor, should heal themselves. The children, who go to bed hungry, should be ignored while 30% of well off children cause beds to sag under their obesity.
You know that poor sap who lost his job to low wage workers in China in the name of increased stock value should be glad he has a car to shelter his family from the rain and praise Wal-Mart and McDonalds for their clean bathrooms.
On the other hand, the story could support those values. Should we really prop up the weak? Is it in some way condescending to cater to those less fortunate, to create a false sense of well being or even success. Does everybody need a trophy?
Part of growth is tasting defeat and disappointment (I should know, I'm a life long Cubs fan.)
So, forget about price supports and farm subsidies and generous tax breaks for those who drill oil wells. A couple of years ago Exxon had $20 billion in profits yet received a tax rebate of $158 million. This week a day will be dedicated to the "I built this" crowd. This day wills be rich with crowing and the government can be demonized while continuing stuffs the pockets of its critics.
Michael
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THE OTHER STORY: THE IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM EFFECT AND THE FUTURE OF A MANAGED SOCIETY
We are selective in our empathy. We individualize our empathy by giving selective attention to someone in immediate need. We have trouble getting our hearts and minds around major issues that impact us all.
Politicians know this and exploit it to advantage. Senior citizens are especially vulnerable to this manipulation. They fear the social support system will be taken from them (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), but fail to register the same fear regarding the soaring national debt that impacts their children and grandchildren, and the viability and stability of the nation. Loss of the safety net is palpable in the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, when unemployment and the national debt should be the core of concern.
President Barak Obama often sounds like a member of the Occupy Wall Street crowd rather then as Commander in Chief of the nation.
This is not totally his fault. This is how he has been programmed as the consummate technocrat. We no longer produce leaders, but tacticians.
Technocrats focus on polls and operate tactically teasing out thematic concerns rather than strategically addressing core perturbations of society. We no longer have strategic thinkers who produced the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. We have selective interventionists. Obamacare and the taking out of Osama Bin Laden were monumental but still tactical maneuvers.
Tacticians follow polls and play to media. Strategists see beyond the horizon to the new tomorrow. You don't garner immediate gratification for delayed results. For example, prudent fiscal policies now are unlikely to reach any kind of fruition for ten to twenty years. Consequently, it would appear strategic thinking, which is creative thinking (what we can find out) versus critical thinking (what we already know), has been leeched out of our temperament.
No president has been reelected with such a high rate of unemployment, nor has any president seen the national debt rise so quickly and to such heights. Indeed, no president has been less effective with Congress, yet Obama leads in the polls, while showing little capacity to lead. Why?
Competence doesn’t seem to matter to us as much as charisma. Obama is likeable. Few see Mitt Romney as charismatic, but most would agree that he is competent. I voted for Obama four years ago, and I am a registered Republican. I will vote for him again if he will tell me his game plan for changing his mainly failed administration around in the next four years.
Obama cannot race bait me, or rich bait me, or scare bait me, or Bain bait me, or indeed, austerity bait me. I know who pays the taxes, and so does he. People pay taxes who are relatively successful, not people looking for a handout. There is a line in one of my books that speaks to my sentiment:
To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996).
Soon, if something is not done about the national debt, all the money the federal government brings in will go to paying the interest on that debt with nothing left over for social programs much less the maintenance of the infrastructure or our military defense.
Now why is that?
Professor H. W. Brands of the University of Texas writes in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2012) of President Lyndon Johnson being the consummate power broker. Johnson demonstrated a kind of individualism and leadership that has disappeared in the last half century.
Obama and Romney are skilled technocrats. Johnson was the skilled salesman. The narrative of the current presidential campaigns has little to do with solving rational concerns. It is preoccupied with our irrational anxieties, appealing to our emotions, biases, and proprietary needs. Campaign ads vacillate between the absurd and the hysterical in this connection.
For a nation that only wants reassurance little attention is given to our fatal flaw, self-indulgence.
We have been on this retreat from individualism and personal responsibility for decades. Brands sees this in generational terms. He writes:
Every generation gains its impressions of the world at a formative age. In private life, this typically occurs in childhood. In public life, it happens in early adulthood. Johnson’s generation came of age in the 1940, as the United States dominated the global economy as no country ever had before (or would after).
The 1920s generation was like the childhood of our nation forced on to the world stage with WWI. Fin de siecle, we had former President Theodore Roosevelt, and his rugged individualism (“Speak softly but carry a big stick.), and then President Woodrow Wilson's internationalism (League of Nations). Roosevelt completed the Panama Canal, which the French abandoned. Wilson was one of the architects of the League of Nations, which he couldn’t persuade the US to join, but still set the table for the eventual birth of the United Nations as his legacy. They were leaders.
WWII and its aftermath dominated the 1940s. Brands writes:
President Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to the institutional power of the presidency was not the New Deal, but the postwar international order and the agencies and bureaus he and Congress established to direct it.
Johnson gets poor marks for power management internationally, but high marks for wielding influence, which is required in domestic politics. Obama would appear to be better at power (internationally) than influence (domestically).
The 1960s and 1970s generations were steps back into the childhood mode (baby boomers, the “X” and “Y” generations). It was a time of cloying disenchantment and protective regimentation with a new scholastic order and curriculum brought on by Sputnik (Soviet Union first in space). There was also the step forward with Johnson’s bold Great Society, then a step back again with the costly defeat in life and treasure in Vietnam. Johnson understood influence but not power. Brands writes:
To have at one’s disposal the most formidable military in world history, with the potential to annihilate a large part of the human race, is to wield power greater than that possessed by any emperor, tsar, or dictator. And yet, the most striking characteristic of U.S foreign relations during the Johnson years was the diminishing efficacy of American power. Johnson’s quest for power had nothing to do with foreign policy; his passions and instincts were wholly domestic.
* * *
My generation came to fruition in the 1960s. Like most young men of my generation, I spent time in the military serving at sea in the Mediterranean. As a corpsman, I was set to go with the US Marines into Port Said in Egypt when the British and French bombed the Suez Canal. This was halted when President Eisenhower issued a “stand down.” Eisenhower knew war as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in WWII, and exercised power as opposed to influence. He led.
In the 1960s, I also worked and lived abroad being a part of America’s emerging international corporate presence.
Brands defines power, as the capacity to make people do what they don’t want to do; influence is the ability to make them want what you want. My novel (A Green Island in a Black Sea) is about this wrenching dichotomy, with the focus on individualism in a collapsing world of conformity.
My lament is that the individualism I experienced as a boy that produced unconscious but sincere empathy is all but gone. We now celebrate what once was natural.
Life is a story, and this piece is part of my reaction to what I see and feel. It is the lament of a philosopher, who is in his last innings, knowing that technology, which is celebrated as if it were a god, has put the technocrat on center stage with little sense of where technology will take us. We have gone from a God-centered spiritual universe to a man-centered secular universe to an other world-centered universe, which I’m not sure has much room for man and therefore for empathy.
Be always well,
Jim.
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