Legacy

Legacy

by Marco M. Pardi

“I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no super human authority behind it.” Albert Einstein. Letter to a Baptist pastor. 1953

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As Tonio ambled along among the pedestrians next to the street he again wondered if one could determine the country’s driving pattern by the pedestrian walking pattern. Do right side drivers walk on the right and left side drivers walk on the left? Back home some commented on his habitually slow walk. In answer, he cited injuries from a car accident. One which never happened. But those very few unfortunates who had seen him without clothes took the scars as confirmation of the accident. Which had never happened.

Much earlier that morning, after completing a clean SDR, he drifted into a small, empty park. Ahead was a pond and four benches in a row. As he passed a trash container he noted the chalked V on the side, the letter V to everyone else and the Roman numeral 5 for him. Subtracting the number for the day of the week he took off his book bag and settled on the first bench. From his bag, marked with the logo of the university sponsoring his research, he removed his camera and snapped a couple of pictures of the pond. Then he rose and moved to the third bench in the row and set his bag on the ground in front of him. Digging in his bag for another lens, he swept his hand up under the bench and retrieved the numbered key which had been taped there. He pushed it into a slit in the camera case lining.

Being a NOC, he could have no direct contact with embassy personnel and he had to enter the country clean. Therefore, his requested hardware, a Spetsnaz issue SR-1 Vektor using 9X21mm Gyurza body armor piercing ammunition, two extra magazines, and a Vektor specific suppressor had been sealed in a small university logo box and placed in a train station rental locker by an embassy based case officer.

The crowd of pedestrians was thinning as Tonio again contemplated the “national security” importance of his assignment, pushing back the intrusive thoughts of well connected policy makers for whom these executive actions brought financial benefits as well. Just then a little girl, seven or eight years old and reed thin, scampered past him. A few steps past him her skirt billowed as she suddenly squatted. He quickly scanned the oncoming pedestrians and the few windows and balconies facing him. Was she marking him?

Just as he concluded there were no shooters the girl leaped up and kept moving. Tonio came up on a bolus of brownish mucous where the girl had been. As he glanced at the evidence of illness he saw the problem: round, white worms wriggling in the sunlight. He flared with anger. The small ruling class of this country lived in opulent urban palaces, entertained in country dachas surrounded by armed guards, and little girls were sucked thin by worms they expelled on the streets. Unmindful of the discomfort, he quickened his pace toward the train station.

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I consider myself to be a person who, generally, is slow to anger. That may be because, as I have said, I don’t have a fuse – I have a switch. Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t get irritated. And, unfortunately some people confuse irritation with anger. My irritation shows; my anger does not. I have not tried to inventory what makes me angry. I eschew pedestrian psychology and the latest self-help and wellness fads. But I do know that some things affect me, even to the point of action. In fact, it could be said that writing this compendium of over 250 posts probably arises from a felt need to act, though I by no means intend to flog the reader.

In my Death & Dying classes, even when provided under the designation, Perspectives in Critical Thinking, I proposed that anger is a secondary emotion, arising as a reaction to something else. That something else is almost always Fear. And fear is rooted in the feeling that one is or will be unable to control the outcome of what is perceived to be a developing situation. We dread being rendered impotent and we lash out in what is labeled as anger. For example, I’ve often heard it said that people fear death. I respond, Be specific: People do not fear being dead; they fear getting dead. They fear a process over which they have lost control.

So, in everyday life what is there to fear? What is there that might trigger our anger? When witnessing a harmful process in motion that a person or non-human animal is unable to stop, such as a beating or even attempted killing I have a flash of fear for the victim which immediately triggers a level of anger that manifests in action. I experience true anger. Chief Dan George, a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a Coast Salish band in the southeast area of the District of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is quoted as saying: “A child does not question the wrongs of grown-ups. He suffers them.”

We can internalize that concept and apply it in many ways. I am angry when I read of the so-called Republican Party (in actuality, the American Fascist Party) placing their core value – greed – above the safety and health of our children in the face of the very real threat of Covid-19. Refusing to mandate masks in businesses and schools makes certain that, especially with the new Delta variant, more people will become seriously, even fatally ill and infect children in the process. The Party apparently fears economic downturn more than the long term damage to or fatal consequences for their own children. But we’ve known this for decades. This is the same group that has fought regulation of polluting industries, stalled enhanced safety measures in school buses and private vehicles, stopped common sense measures such as universal background checks for firearms purchases, and has attempted to void the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, the Consumer Protection Bureau and numerous other programs and measures designed to ensure the opportunity for their own children to grow into health adults. And yet this same group wraps itself in the soiled robes of religion as it employs absolutely fallacious “science” to justify overturning a woman’s right to control her fertility, either through contraception of abortion. Why? Could it be because since the legalization of abortion the yearly statistics show overwhelmingly that abortions are the last resort of those women and families, especially minorities, that cannot afford a child, or another child. Keeping this population on the edge of outright destitution keeps them willing to accept working conditions and pay befitting third world countries. All in the name of staggering Greed.

Every time I read of some new assault on the environment, even as the evidence for impending disaster compounds every day, or some new attempt to render entire sectors of the population impotent, such as the Republican efforts across the United States to restrict voting to those who will vote for them I wonder, Do these people not have children? Do these people have special places they go to breathe clean air and drink safe water?

Not many years ago a famous, if uncomfortable question was common: “What did you do in the War, Daddy?” We are in a war. But this is a war like no war before it; this is a war in which we are shooting ourselves with ammunition made of stupidity and greed. Our younger children unquestioningly look to us with trust. Fortunately, many of our older children have seen the march of the lemmings and refuse to fall in line. I recently had the opportunity to speak with college and post-graduate students. They agreed that, even with their powerful and portable degrees, their basic plans were to be quickly adaptable in the coming face of accelerating and fundamental change. In other words, the plan was to have no plan they could not quickly change.

Of course, some say that through government spending we are leaving our descendants a legacy of insurmountable debt. If we continue to turn a blind eye to the current practices this will be true. If, on the other hand, we recognize Fascist practices for what they are we can reverse this. These practices surfaced with the Reagan administration’s attempt at “trickle down economics”, tax exemptions and subsidies to major corporations on the claim that these will generate jobs. There is zero proof any jobs were created; instead, the corporations re-invested in themselves, including the purchase of automation to further reduce the work force. And, of course, these corporations became major donors to keep the political party in power. This is a core principle of Fascism. Another example was the conversion of the federal retirement system from tax supported to a system in which tax money was invested in the stocks of hand picked major corporations and administered by an un-elected, unknown person picked by the administration to choose which corporations got the windfall. This was then used as the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS). A core principle of Fascism, yet G. W. Bush attempted to do the same with Social Security. Closing the tax loopholes for the super rich and assessing fair and proper taxation on corporations will negate the development of “insurmountable debt”. But as long as Fascists remain in power the average citizen will pay the price for his own confinement. And Democracy will become a memory.

I’ve always thought “legacy” was something I could define, something I could point to as something I had achieved and could leave to my descendants. Apparently even that has changed. The legacy we are leaving to those who survive our rapacious stupidity is captured in one word: Uncertainty.