We have all stood behind that proverbial trigger my friends. We have all in some way helped kill someone. We stand idle when someone is bullied, we turn a blind eye to someone in need, we support politicians who seek to make it harder not only on those less than us, but make it harder on ourselves. We lie about each other, we set people up, we say things to each other that we know will cut, and while most of us go out of our way to not further ourselves at the expense of others, we still do it to some degree.
This remains, you can kill a man without physically harming them. Take away all they have worked for, all they own, family, friends, dignity, their very hope. Without those things a person is little more than a bipedal animal with the ability to speak, reason and think. This does lead to an interesting moral quandary, but more about that later.
We all know people like this,
completely dead on the inside, yet still living, breathing, and
thinking. I just sat down for coffee with a high school friend of
mine. I had fallen out of contact with him, it happens. You
graduate, go off to college, join the military, find a job, move
away, in simple terms, life happens. But here I am sitting in the
city near where we both went to school, and the first thing that
struck me, outside of the fact that he looked like he hadn't shaven
in years, and his hair was a combination of Trump's toupee and a
mullet, was that the general impression I got was that he didn't want
to be there.
Sure he seemed happy enough to be
reconnecting with a friend who had all but vanished after high
school, someone who left and didn't return for twenty years. Yeah,
when I graduated from high school, I bolted, and nobody knew what
happened, for all they knew I had been abducted by aliens and had not
been returned. But he looked totally out of place, out of his
element in society. No, he had not been incarcerated, he was working
a dead end job, a few actually. I had bolted for other places, he
had gone to the local college, married a girl, had a kid, graduated,
got a decent job, and all the other things that come with the
American Dream.
He plugged away, playing by the rules,
did everything by the book. Really, most people do, but in life
there is always a risk. So, why is this old friend of mine sitting
across from me in a coffee shop, looking like he did. The wheels
came off of his life. From 2007 to 2012 he lost his job, he lost his
wife and children. The wife got the house in the divorce, he moved
back home with his parents. Outside of working as a delivery driver
for a hole in the wall pizza joint, and whatever other odd jobs he
can find, he rarely leaves the house. Something inside of him died
when he spent that five years getting drug over the coals.
But lets move to someone we have all
known, we read his work when he posts here. He is as dead as they
come. I would say he would be upset with me talking about him, but
he isn't online currently, and does not know when he will be back.
Even when he gets back online, I doubt he will be upset, I think that
he hit the end of that rope in March. Sure, things for him are
getting better, the tent is gone, a relic of the past. He has a home
now. Somewhere between the time that his father passed away after
years of homelessness, and today trying to find stable work to
rebuild his life, whatever makes a person a person died. Like my
high school friend, he just goes through the motions. Good days and
bad days are all the same to him. He has withdrawn into himself.
Sure, he gets on FaceBook, he posts, he comments, he talks to people.
He files applications for work, and on occasion will answer his
phone. The only time he leaves the house he resides in is to mow the
grass or go to the store. He does not live, he merely exists, a
shell of a person. The stories he wrote, the books he wanted to
publish sit unfinished, their files unopened on a laptop with a dead
battery, and even if there was power at his new home, he does not
seem interested in working on them.
You see, what led up to his
homelessness, with his parents, his inability to find work, to get
help, to rebuild his life have robbed him of hope. Even in my
darkest times, I remain able to see hope. Hope for a better day,
hope that things will improve, that in the end whatever cosmic pay
scale exists will eventually balance out.
The type of dead I am talking about
have lost that. For them, there is no life, only existing. An
existence where good things do not happen to them, and when good
things come, the expectation that the hammer will drop is always
present. For them, the good comes, and the bad will be there shortly
to take it away. I think for him, life has been so bad for so long
that he not only feels helpless in the face of all that has happened
and will happen, that it has built a strong sense of hopelessness.
Sadly, its not just him. There are so many people like him.
It is compounded by everything, the
people eating out when you have to make a meal on a dollar pack of
mashed potatoes and bread because its all you have. Its the people
who proudly tell him to “pull himself up by the bootstraps,” or
that they escaped that downward spiral and they are unable to
understand why he cannot do the same. The murder of this man started
when he was a mere child, thirty-four years of slow deaths caught up
with one of the most stubborn bullheaded toughest men I have ever
been graced with knowing. A man I watched work to exhaustion, yet
still keep doing. A man I have watched rebuild his life several
times in the fifteen years I have known him. A short story about him
to illustrate my point. In 2011 on of his subordinates had an
accident on his way to work, this joker goes to the site in the
middle of a raging snow storm to find the subordinate, and when he
could not find him or contact him, this guy starts looking for him.
After he and another co-worker came in to find this joker, they learn
that he had gone home. The co-worker said he would stay, and John
went to leave when he slipped on a patch of unseen ice and fell. The
next night John went to work, but was experiencing severe back pain,
to the point that some of the miners had to help him into his truck
because he could not get in it on his own. He called his boss, and
on threat of termination, John went to the hospital and learned that
he had bruised his spine, and broke his left elbow. He had a
co-worker trade shifts with him, and he went back to work the next
day.
To see a man who would work, no matter
how severe the pain he suffered was, who would work himself into the
ground no matter how badly he felt or how sick he was, a man that
kept pushing forward constantly, pull up to the table and be so
totally broken and hopeless is disheartening. I would say we all
know someone like him, someone who day in and day out continues to
push forward, to fight their situation, to advance in life, only to
be beaten back down, to fail. It seems to me, failure has a heavy
weight to it, and we seem to forget the toll it takes.
But that leads me back to the moral
quandary I spoke of earlier. If you can say that there are numerous
ways to murder someone, yet never physically harm them, are you
responsible for taking part in that murder if they kill themselves?
Are you responsible if you turn a blind eye to someone who has lost
hope? You have not taken an active role in it, you are not the one
who stole from them, you are not the one who took their home, you are
not their employer, you might not even know that person outside of
having laid eyes upon them a single time. But are you responsible
for their non-physical death?
No comments:
Post a Comment