Skip to main content

CONVENIENT MORALITY




The pampered middle class suburbanite that I am, complaining of back pain as those of us who are of a certain age often do I dragged myself to work. I work the afternoon shift. I managed to stop at a convenience store to pick up a sandwich and coffee. I bought a lottery ticket. My wife and I are not poor we are middle class, barely. But with two years, four months until I retire at sixty-five, a lottery win would erase all anxiety about our retirement years.

Are we not driven to wish a better life for our loved ones? Our spouses, our children, grandchildren, our parents, if they are still alive, these are the people we would first like to help with a windfall. That was my altruistic view when I paid for my food, drink and chance at being a hero.

Laden down with my wares and my car keys, I exited the store. A dishevelled man of indeterminate age, dirty looking, with bad teeth, uncombed hair and beard asked me for change.

Honestly, I had no change. I paid for my stuff with a credit card. I put my last two dollars of real cash into the lottery machine. I shook my head, got into my car and left.

What a shitty thing to do!

How bad was that guy’s life that he had to pan handle outside a convenience store? What was his story? Drugs? Drink? Mental illness? I didn’t even stop to ask, I didn’t care. No! Worse than that, I didn’t stop to think. My focus was on getting to work and how bad I had it because my back was hurting and I had to go to work anyway, the universe was so against me!

What a dick!

Back on my way to work, yeah, to the job I was trained to do because I was educated enough to work at a good middle class job and take care of my family. I had food by my side, yeah, it wasn’t me going hungry, in fact, I‘m supposed to lose weight!

And let’s not lose sight of the fact that I am an immigrant to this country! I became a citizen so I could vote but I am not born here.

Why didn’t I take the guy into the store and order him a sandwich? I could have done that, easily.

I didn’t even think of it.

And what of the many millions of folks here in America, the richest country in the world, who suffer even worse than this poor wretch that I ignored!

I consider myself a moral person. Relatively, anyway. And yet if that is so, how could I have failed to help this person? Why did it never dawn on me to buy him a sandwich? I had no cash to give him so it wasn’t like I was concerned he would just buy drugs or drink. I could have bought him something to eat and drink with my card. Nope. Not even a thought of doing that.

And I call myself a moral person.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nirvana

I can no more cease to write than you can stop breathing. It is my salvation. Writing is my path to Nirvana, where suffering has been extinguished, and complete peace is realized, if you believe that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I do, but it's a nice sentiment. For me, since I must work at doing something that fails to excite me in any meaningful way, I must search for my own meaning. Writing is the vehicle I use now. It used to be that my path lay with studying martial arts, but life changes, the body wearies. I suspect many of us, no, most of us, are in the same boat. We are trying to manage our lives the best we can while searching for Nirvana, our own private paradise, or however we might  describe it. Viktor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning. He posits that our meaning is what we choose it to be and that meaning may change day to day. He said, "“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” Following your passion ...

My Mother

My mother has died. That somber fact has me processing thoughts of guilt, love, and my own mortality. I am officially an orphan. My mother was one of the “Railway Children,” those Liverpool kids sent to the countryside to escape the bombing during World War II. She and her sister were sent to Wales and were bounced from household to household, relative to relative, and finally to an orphanage. Dad moved to Canada in 1960 to forge a better a life for us. Before my mum took my sister and I to join him, the family held an “American wake,” a mournful goodbye, as if a loved one had died. Mum left everything and everybody she ever knew to join her husband in the new world. My mother and father worked hard to give us a good life. There were tough times, money was scarce, and there was tension between my parents. Hell, let me be honest, my father hit my mother, I saw it. My mum was sixty when she left my dad. She just walked out with the clothes on her back. That was my mum. Tough. W...

PEERING INTO THE ABYSS

I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized. Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest. Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted. I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605. And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking. There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via che...