No Retreat, No Surrender

Like soldiers in the winter's night

With a vow to defend

No retreat, baby, no surrender

—Bruce Springsteen

This is me not waving the white flag. 

My country has been taken over by people who, in important respects, do not share my morals. I was raised by men and women who, leaving aside the very human character defects from which most of us suffer—dollops of avarice, lust and pride—were charitable and humble. I suspect, or at least hope, most of us were. 

But there’s a new gang in town, and its name is MAGA. They live by the Viking code of vanquishing and plundering their enemies (sorry Scandinavia, it was a long time ago, you got much better).

In The New York Times this week, David French considered why members of the MAGA gang don’t seem to care about the misery they inflict on others. The reason, French says, crediting an early twentieth century German political theorist, is that the political philosophy of MAGA is that of friend or enemy. When dealing with the enemy, any behavior, however repugnant by normal standards, is ok.

So MAGA is not my friend, doesn’t want to be, is not one bit interested in non-MAGAs like me and our pitiful, simpering weakness. To borrow from another famous German philosopher, they are supermen.

But MAGA barely won the last election. Based on the popular vote, half of us likely are not cool with the MAGA power play that is unfolding in the early days of the new administration. 

So why do I feel so alone in my foxhole?

I know there are others like me. I read opinion pieces expressing outrage and incredulity. But rather than clarion calls to battle, they sometimes seem more like the last gasps of people about to be burned at the stake. We are not witches, they cry, as the flames consume them. And then they are silent. And others too. No one wants to be burned at the stake. Seeing it actually happening to others understandably makes us feel like perhaps we should hide our pointy hats and broomsticks.

But the end is near only if we allow it to be. We have to screw up our courage and fight. It’s not as bad here (yet) as it was in countries occupied by Germany in WW II. Even there, people fought. They gathered in secret. They published resistance leaflets. They tormented and harassed their occupiers when they could. They kept hope alive until they were liberated.

We aren’t going to be saved by Eisenhower’s Allied forces, but then we aren’t as bad off as was German occupied Europe (again, yet). We must be our own army, fighting in courts, legislatures and elections. 

And we must fight against our own enervating despair. We must tell each other what we are doing, even the small things that may seem inconsequential in themselves but add strength and vigor to the efforts of others. We must give one another hope that we can succeed.

In America (still, so far), the path to victory is through the ballot box. We have to organize for that, of course. We have to campaign.

But first, we need to buck up. We can to this. We must. Our lives depend on it.

Opportunity Cost

 Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

—Bob Seeger

I remember going into my grandfather’s dim bedroom one afternoon late in his long life. He was sitting up in bed, in faded blue pajamas, his hair combed neatly, his catheter bag mostly hidden by a fold of sheet on the side of the bed. It was the walnut bed he had made for his wedding when he was 21. His wife of 67 years had been gone for ten years by then, even longer if you take into account the years she didn’t remember who he was, who anyone was, leaving him alone in their bed. His head was turned toward the window where sparrows were popping on and off a bird feeder that had a squirrel deterrent collar around it that the squirrels used to hang down and eat their fill. He looked over at me with a wistful expression, and I asked what he was up to, as if I had just been in the kitchen cleaning up and was checking on him, as if I were there all the time instead of once a week, maybe twice, to visit in the afternoons, sometimes with my children, his great-grandchildren.

“I’m just lying here thinking about every mean thing I ever did to my children,” he said.

His son, my uncle, tells the story of coming in one night late and drunk when he was a teenager and winding up on his back from a quick punch and looking down the hallway to see his father’s bathrobe flapping in retreat. My mother was anxious, and I wonder if she ever felt she fully lived up to her parent’s hopes for her, but she never let on that they said anything to make her feel she wasn’t good enough. My grandfather was a preacher’s son, a deacon in the church himself, a college president, a good man who followed the commandments of his faith to feed the poor and visit the sick. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do many mean things to his children.

And yet, now, as I move into the last decades of my own life, hoping to live to be 98, as he did, my children all grown and off on their own, I find myself occasionally wandering down my grandfather’s melancholy path. It’s easier for me to have those regrets, I think. I have done mean things to my children, no doubt more than he did. Sometimes I would get too mad when I scolded them; sometimes I even spanked them. I divorced the mother of my first three, and I understand now that although I had convinced myself they were old enough to understand, I was wrong.

It’s not the direct, obvious offenses that bother me at three in the morning, though. It’s something much vaguer, but perhaps because of its uncertainty even more troubling. Call it opportunity cost. We all know what that is: it’s when you let time go by without taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, or when you put time and money into something only to realize later that they would have been better spent on something else. 

We think of opportunity cost as our own responsibility, or fault, something we did or didn’t do, a choice we made. But as a parent, I, and maybe others like my grandfather and me, blame ourselves for the opportunities our children missed. If I had just insisted that she stick with piano lessons… If I had taught him how to manage money better… If I had convinced him he should take chances in love…

Some parents live through their children. This is different than that, though. More painful, in a way. I’ve learned (the hard way) that my children don’t want me to tell them what to do. Mostly I resist. This isn’t about seeing them about to make a mistake and rushing in with a warning of good advice. I do that less and less. No, this is something more systemic, reaching back deeply into their childhoods, when they were mine to mold, or at least I thought they were, and I worry I didn’t do a good job shaping their raw clay. And because of that, because of my failures when they were young, their missed opportunities as adults are my fault. This is a particularly devastating revelation when it comes long past the time I can do anything about it. I have taught them to be independent, to make their own decisions, but may have left them ill-equipped for the task.

I know, I know, I’m beating myself up way too much. Maybe. I wasn’t an abusive or neglectful dad, I did most of the things good dads are supposed to do. It’s up to them now. And each of them is doing a great job stewarding their life. They are all happy and successful.

And yet late at night the dread creeps in that I didn’t do enough. Perhaps the real question is whether, no matter how much I did, I could ever feel it was enough. There is some piece missing in me, I fear, not them. Maybe it is the same piece my grandfather felt was missing in him. Something that denies contentment when looking back over the landscape of fatherhood. Maybe lots of dads feel this way, not just my grandfather and me. I hope not.