By John Taylor; 5 September, 2005
Not long after we moved to Dunnville my nephew Jason also moved to a house in another part of town, along with his live-in girlfriend Lilla. They resided here several months until they decided to try their fortunes out West and both moved to Calgary. Lilla left several boxes of books and personal papers for my father to store in his basement apartment, promising to pick them up in a few months when they had settled down. Months turned into years and my father's repeated attempts to contact Lilla failed. Jason and Lilla's relationship ended, and still no word. Jason is now on his second or third new girlfriend now, and still not a word from Lilla about her personal documents and books. Since they were mostly in Hungarian, the books did not have resale value around here. At last I offered to take the piles of boxes off father's hands and load them into the foreign language section of the roomful of books about to be carted off at the end of the Dunnville library's annual summer book sale. I am a book lover and that was the only dignified resting place I could find, other than a dumpster.
The personal papers ended up in the trash and it was my sad job to go through them quickly to make sure there was no cash or other valuables. In fact there was a diamond studded bracelet in an unopened package from Hungary, which I passed on to Silvie for her birthday, which had just taken place. How could anyone let their personal history, childhood letters and photographs slip into oblivion like that? I was tempted to keep it all and make use of it as writing material, but that would just be inviting future lawsuits. Safer and wiser though not less painful to just feed the whole mass into oblivion. However one sentence from her diary that she had kept as a teen jumped out at me and I have not forgotten it. It was intended as a word of praise for her mother.
"I like my mom because she is fair. No matter how much I kick and scream, she never takes my side in my disputes with her boyfriend."
I found this profoundly sad. The girl's natural father was evidently still in Hungary -- the unopened diamond bracelet may have been sent to her from him -- and she had told me before she left that she was raised in Yugoslavia. Somehow her mother had ended up here in Canada, stuck in the usual merry-go-round of serial sexual partners. If their family had been unified some member of it -- an uncle or grandparent -- would surely have intervened to save these papers. It was her own apathy combined with the weakness of family bonds that eradicated the mementos of her childhood -- along with many family documents -- while she was still a relatively young person. The result will be that her children, should she have any, will have no place to look back upon to find their identity and place in the river of human history.
You can talk about marriage and sexual morality as a personal or moral concern but rifling through those papers it was not the moralist but the historian in me who was most offended. When people fail to maintain lifelong love and strong bonds of family, it is not the person who loses, it is the family and -- ultimately -- history. It is the next generation. A non-person is someone with no future, no history and no power. Only non-persons can be born of temporary alliances, for they have no personal history to look back upon. The term for that used to be "illegitimacy," but that idea has long ago gone down the toilet bowl of history, along with millions of life stories just like Lilla's.
It used to be fashionable to sneer at what was contemptuously termed "middle class morality," before sexual morality went by the board completely and marriage became just another lifestyle choice, along with homosexual unions. But what is middle class morality? It is the set of techniques, the reciprocity and way of relating within a family that lead to prosperity and happiness in the long term. A member of the middle class is someone who has accomplished the extremely difficult task of raising himself up out of the indigent majority that prevailed everywhere not so long ago.
A person cannot build a fortune and all the other forms of wealth and information that make up heritage alone. This has to be done along with others over several generations within a unified, happy and effective family. That is what sexual morals are, the ability to love, plan, work hard and forge together a history over several generations. Without strong moral discipline even a person who starts off wealthy will fritter everything away, wealth, mementos, the experience gained by a lifelong career, everything. If he himself does not end up poor, powerless and nameless, his progeny will. Such was the heritage, or lack of heritage, that Lilla was born into. My unpleasant job was just burying a limb of the body, an amputated arm or leg. I pray that the living body will live on and learn to prosper.
The indigent are powerless, nameless and helpless, robbed of their history, almost by definition. When there are too many homeless and car-less people even the guardians of public safety are forced into silence. Witness this, from a report on the botched preparations against the disaster in New Orleans last week:
"Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on Louisiana's state evacuation plan said little attention was paid to the evacuation of New Orleans low-mobility population -- the elderly, infirm and poor without cars or other means of leaving the city, who totaled about 100,000 people. At disaster planning meetings, he said, "The answer was often silence..." "There was not much attention paid to the low mobility population," Wolshon said, "That's the million-dollar question." ("What a mess!" By Scott Shane and Eric Lipton, Hamilton spectator Saturday, September 3, 2005, D18)
Of course the planner's answer was silence; there is nothing that anybody can say. There was silence because this problem goes deeper than anything you can be planned for at that level. The rot is buried as deep as the history of slavery and tyranny, both of which rule by divide and conquer, by intentionally robbing a people of their history and their power. Only radical change is worth talking about, a multi-trillion dollar compensation spent wisely over several generations as partial reparation for the blight of slavery. Only such complete reconciliation for the injustices of the past will exorcise the demon of racism, and its outer expressions, such as homelessness and immobility of large portions of the population. And if it seems too painful for the privileged, let them go and read again the parable of the prodigal son.
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John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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