Posted on by Fred · 2 Comments

The Value of a Person

The Value of a Person

My value is not defined by how much money I can earn. Neither, for me at least, is yours. Such a definition is not only narrow, in that it focuses on only one small part of the thousands of elements of my existence, it is also among the least interesting. Can I make you laugh? Can I cause you to smile? Can I make you think? Can I entertain you? Am I someone to whom you might reasonably turn for love and kindness? Do I know as much about Star Trek as you do? Did “Go Set A Watchman” ruin “To Kill a Mockingbird” for me? Do I believe that’s even a relevant question? Would a comma straighten out your sentence for you? I’m the Guy to Ask. All of those are more interesting definitions of your friend. They’re also all among the indicators of Your Value to Me.

Many of the people on my Friends List are women upon whom, when I was in The Hormone Haze that is the existence of a 15 year old boy, I had a terrible crush. Was that because they were physically attractive? Undoubtedly. So should I make all of my judgments about women based upon their attractiveness? And, if I did, wouldn’t you loathe me for such an unimportant and single minded appraisal of my friends? And if anyone made their sole method of judging me my physical attractiveness, I would have few friends, indeed. It’s simply one of the thousand elements of them in which I once had an interest.

Their real value to me, now that I’m no longer a boy, lies in their ideas. It has to do with how they see the world. It’s what I learn from seeing glimpses into their worlds. They’re like Elizabeth Bennet for me. I never lived in 18th Century England. But I’ve seen it from her eyes, and it enriches my understanding of, and to, my own world. And, if you don’t love Elizabeth Bennet, I beseech you, now that you’re an adult, to read “Pride and Prejudice.” If you still don’t love Lizzy, I need to understand you better.

Just as wrong as I would be to make my judgment of a person based on their physical attributes, I would be equally offended if I were to be judged solely on the amount of money I can earn. This would be equally true if I were physically attractive or I could earn large sums of money. Why, then, are we willing to make such narrow judgments about strangers? I refuse to believe the only value of someone else is how much money they can earn, or how physically attractive that person may be.

And I believe all people, simply because they have been born, deserve the basics of living. I know many people who publish memes of blank pieces of paper that are the list of all the things the world owes you. I can’t agree with that.

Neither you nor I nor any of them ever asked to be born. We simply were. We were the fastest sperm, but we didn’t even ask to be that. And we survive on this planet only because others, at some point, took care of us. In fact, we all rely on each other, in greater or lesser ways, to survive even now. Someone has to grow our food. Someone has to pick it, or slaughter it. Someone has to package it. Someone has to ship it. Someone has to stock it on the shelf. Someone has to sell it to you. And that was just lunch. We depend on each other. Is that Socialism? I don’t know. We can debate economic theories another time. I’m simply pointing out that, as John Donne told us, “No man is an island entire of itself.”

Yes, we all live in our own worlds. Our experiences are ours alone, unique to each of us. But we also all live in the same world. We share it. There is no other to which we can go. This planet is all there is for any of us.

Let’s make it as nice for everyone as we can. Let’s not decide that some of us are better than others for reasons that have nothing to do with who we are. If you’re a serial killer, I’m probably a better person than you are. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a better person than I am; otherwise I wouldn’t want you on my Friends List. I improve myself by being around those better than I am, in the same way you’ll become a better musician by playing with Miles Davis than you will by playing with me. Some people are better than others, yes. But let’s make those judgments about them for meaningful reasons. And let’s end those judgments at the point of deciding whether we want to be their friends, instead of deciding that, because we don’t like someone very well, they don’t deserve the basics of life. Yes, they do. So do I. So do you.

Posted on by Fred · 4 Comments

The Spiral of Poverty

“I’ve seen the bottom, and I’ve been on top, but mostly I’ve lived in between…”

Dan Fogelberg

It’s easy to blame the victims of poverty for their state. They’re lazy. They don’t manage money well enough. They should get a better job. Those things can be true. Some of them are true of my poverty.

Sometimes it’s something else.

They get laid off. They retire. They change jobs. They have massive bills they hadn’t anticipated. Their health declines. Any of these can cause poverty. And they are, by no means, the only causes. The causes are as numerous and varied as its victims.

My own poverty is nowhere near as bad as that of most others. I have been fortunate in that I have never had to go without a home. I have never gone without food. I have always managed (even if only barely) to keep myself in the insulin I need in order to survive.

But since I can speak only for myself, I will use my own experiences to explain the spiraling effects of poverty.

I quit teaching in 2016 because I couldn’t do it anymore. I had begun to hate myself because I thought that teaching students that reading is boring was immoral. And thus began my self contempt.

Students whose eyes had once lit up with joy to start the next Sherlock Holmes story, to hear more of Shakespeare, to see if Rainsford could escape from General Zaroff, to see if Santiago could get his marlin back to shore, became students whose eyes glazed over with torpor when we had to do “Close Readings” of empty and soulless works. They soon discovered the only reason to read is to pass a mindless test on a computer.

I fought against it. My principal gave me horrible evaluations because I wasn’t a “team player.” I wasn’t tracking data. I wasn’t updating the My Learning Plan website with “artifacts” to prove that I’m good. I was too busy trying to sneak in something to spark their imaginations. By my final year, all literature had all been banned from my classroom.

Near the end of my career, I was borrowing money from places with neon signs just to make rent. I was working two jobs, and I had even found some roommates in order to reduce my expenses, but it just wasn’t possible to keep up. Why? Teachers make good money, don’t they? Uh… no. And that actually was the beginning of my spiraling poverty.

In 2005, my second marriage, in Maine, where they pay teachers well, fell apart. My father was getting old, and I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer. I came back to Arizona to be with him while I could. And I took a cut of roughly $12,000 a year to do that.

Was that the right decision? I believe it was. You can, however, tell me that my poverty was, then, my fault. I should have stayed in Maine where they paid me a better wage. You may be right.

When I quit in 2016, I pulled the only retirement I had left, (I lost half of it in each of my two divorces) paid off the neon sign places, and I lived, briefly, the life I had always wanted to live. I went several times to California to meet one of my heroes and see him perform. I took Mom there a couple of times. I wrote a screenplay. I made videos. I slept. My depression was kept at bay, and I looked forward to each new day. My contempt for myself, now that I wasn’t doing anything I considered to be immoral, was lessening.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Fred. You should have saved that money.” That may be true. On the other hand, though I live in poverty now, I have memories of beautiful experiences I wasn’t going to have any other way. No one can take that joy away from me.

But once you’re in poverty it spirals.

You get sick and miss work, so your paycheck is short. You have to make choices about what to skip paying. If it’s your car payment, you save some money this month, but next month, you need to find twice as much, and, of course, you have to pay the penalties. Next month, your problem is twice as bad. Your budget fits one car payment, not two. So then they repossess your car.

You don’t want to lose it again, so now you have to buy the cheapest functional car you can. And you have to get it to pass emissions, which, because the car is so old, you can do only if you know a guy who knows a guy who can get the check engine light off long enough to get the guy he knows at Emissions Testing to look the other way. What is normally a $17 bill goes to $117. It’s the price of poverty.

It spirals.

And now you begin to think of yourself as being worthless. You are beneath contempt because all too often you’re begging for help. You beg from friends, from the government, from charities, and from churches. And you hate yourself for that. It’s not what a person, particularly a man in our society, is supposed to do. And your friends are kind, and the government can be helpful if you can jump through all the right hoops, and charities and churches can be nice, too. But, inside, you feel as though what you are doing is no way to live. You spent your life giving. Now you spend it taking. And that’s contemptible.

As I said, it spirals.

So, when you see someone in poverty, you don’t need to give them your sympathy or your money. But you also should try to avoid giving them your contempt. Trust me, they have plenty of that for themselves. And it’s not what any of them want.

Posted on by Fred · 2 Comments

Cruelty

Several weeks ago, I wrote about Kindness, which is, to me, the most valuable human attribute. I believe in its power to help, and to make the world a better place in which to live.

Today, I’m concerning myself with its opposite: Cruelty.

Cruelty has become fashionable. I don’t understand why.

Earlier this week I saw a post on a News Page that talked about Anti Trump protesters being splashed, twice, with snow, water, and ice by a man driving by them, at high speeds, down a street with a snow plow attached to the front of his truck. The street was in no need of plowing. It was perfectly navigable, but there was still snow and ice on its edges. This was not a city worker. He was a private citizen. He did this intentionally because he disapproved of the protesters.

These were Anti Trump protesters, but, to be clear, he would have been equally wrong if the people, who were all in excess of 60 years old, had been Trump supporters. This isn’t about politics.

I read through the comments on the article. People were congratulating him. They were laughing about people they don’t like being hurt.

I posted that I found that horrible. 15 some odd people liked my comment. Quite a number of others, though, told me I was wrong.

Some of the comments included the following:

  1. Fred Eder how were they hurt? Maybe wet but hurt. I forgot their precious feelings.
  2. Ha! Feelings do count to liberals.
    Boo-Hoo
  3. liberal BS!!
  4. He was covering unsightly garbage with fresh clean snow. Should get an award for making his city more beautiful.
  5. Love it. Good for the plow driver

For me, those comments are cruel. They do nothing to help anyone. They are taking delight in the misfortune of others.

There are, in fact, kind Conservatives in the world. They can be intelligent, decent people, just as Liberals can. And there are mean and cruel Liberals in the world. They can be foolish, horrible people, just as Conservatives can.

My concern is that we take delight in bad things happening to those we don’t like. We refer to one another with epithets such as “Snowflake,” or “Libtard,” or “RepuliKKKans,” as though this somehow proves a point.

There is no need to agree with one another on every topic. In fact, it’s unnecessary to agree with each other on nearly anything. One of the women I most admire in the world disagrees with me about everything from politics to the afterlife. But I admire and love her because she is Kind. She is respectful in her disagreement. She cares about my well-being as I care about hers. We encourage one another in our enterprises.

Cruelty isn’t an ideology. It’s a form of immaturity, and it hurts others. It makes the conversations that we need to have in order to solve our problems all but impossible.

I contend that feelings are part of the human experience. They are the reason we bother to exist at all. Without them, nothing has any meaning.

Sometimes feelings will get hurt. That’s a part of life. When I ask a woman out, and she says no, my feelings are likely to be hurt. That’s inevitable. And she doesn’t owe it to me to go out with me because my feelings will be hurt if she doesn’t. All she owes me is a polite no. And there’s not a thing wrong with her for saying no. I’ve come to expect it so much that I never bother to ask anyone out anymore. It’s no fun to be turned down, and it might make her feel uncomfortable. She’s not cruel. She’s just not attracted to me.

But to go out of one’s way to hurt feelings is cruel. No one is helped by it.

I understand if you’re not concerned with helping others. You don’t owe that, I suppose, to anyone. But that doesn’t mean you need to make the lives of others worse.

If you can’t be Kind, you can at least refrain from Cruelty. Join me in that. Please.

Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

Kindness

Kindness

What I find I value most in people is kindness. It’s not just kindness toward me. I’m grateful for that, but, as the vast majority of the world doesn’t know me, I can’t really spend too much time expecting them to be kind to me. It’s when I see people behave kindly toward others that my faith in humanity is restored.

Sometimes, it’s giving the guy outside Circle K a couple of dollars, without making some value judgment about how he’ll spend it. Sometimes a millionaire makes a donation to a school or a hospital. Sometimes it’s the words someone says.

For me, this is where I find the true measure of one’s humanity. It’s not a matter of your achievements. It’s not a question of your wealth. It’s not even in your relationships. It’s about whether you can think of another person as being as important as you are.

If you can do what Atticus suggested, and you can climb inside someone’s skin and walk around in it for a while, and then, move to the next step, your humanity begins to glow. You ask yourself the vital question: What would I need if that were me?

You might not have the money to solve their problems. But you might have a dollar. You might not know the words to say, but you might have a smile. If nothing else, you can look at someone and let them know you see them; they exist. There are times when that simple knowledge can make all the difference.

Because I value kindness, I try my best to show it. I have no money to give anyone, as I have none for myself. But, I can write something for someone who needs help getting the words just right. And I do that. I can remind someone why they matter, even when they don’t want to hear it. And I do that. I can smile because I can summon music I’ve heard and stored in my soul, and I can use it to put a smile on my face, even when I don’t feel external joy. And I do that,too.

I’ve come to believe that my productive days are in the past. I made a difference for 3 decades. I’m proud of that. But, now my health is shot, and the difference I can make is not nearly so great. A friend pointed out that my Defensive Driving courses might still make some difference, and I like to believe she’s right. But I will never have the effect in 5 hours in a room with 30 adults that I had in 7 hours a day, five days a week, nine months of the year with children who wanted to learn.

What I have left to give, then, is Kindness. I don’t believe this makes me soft. It makes me useful. I no longer am a Tree with branches in which a friend can play, rich with leaves that offer shade to shield someone from the sun’s harsh rays. I have no apples left to give. I am naught but an old stump. But Shel Silverstein would tell you that even a stump can be Useful.

If you would like somewhere to sit, there’s room. Come and be for a spell.