Many years ago in a state far, far away, I married into an Irish-American family, acquiring a husband, two sisters-in-law, three brothers-in-law, and a widowed mother-in-law. The man who would have been my father-in-law has died a dozen years earlier in a tragic workplace accident, leaving a wife and six kids, aged 1 through 15. Since he worked for the Department of Defense, his government benefits were able to keep the family in the home that he had built - literally - with his own hands.
My ex-husband was the eldest of the boys, and he helped his father work on the house every weekend. Moving his family from a rundown urban area to a lush green suburban town was a matter of extreme pride to this hardworking, self-made man, and he put a great deal of sweat equity into building a sturdy house for them. A house where some of them lived well into their adult years.
Among them was my brother-in-law. Let's call him "Jimmy". Only five years old when his father died, Jimmy spent much of his adolescent years with what at that time was called "a bad crowd". He dropped out of high school and failed to hold any job for more than a few months, in part because of his penchant for theft from his employers. As the potential for jail loomed large, he enlisted in the Army at age 19.
His time in the Army transformed Jimmy from a dour teenager who spoke in occasional monosyllables and slept until early afternoon every day to a disciplined young man who acquired his GED and even took some college courses.
After his four years in the Army, Jimmy remained restless, unable to hold a job for any length of time. He answered a newspaper ad to drive someone's car to California. A day later, he was gone. He landed a job that combined tedium and low expectations with very good pay, thanks to the Teamsters Union. This enabled him to rent a nice place and spend a few years in San Francisco.
Eventually, though, he returned to his childhood home, joining several of his siblings and his mother. Between selling some sort of dietary supplements that were supposed to boost metabolism and taking on and jettisoning various odd jobs, he remained sufficiently underemployed to adopt this homebound lifestyle for the long haul.
He did have a girlfriend of mysterious origins, someone we thought he had met "out west", but we were provided few details on her background or their relationship. From time to time, Jimmy would move in with her, only to return home whenever things got contentious. He totalled his car, then used his mother's car, leaving her never knowing when she'd get it back.
Follow along below the black hole of lost potential for more...
Somewhere along the line, Jimmy stumbled onto the works of Ayn Rand.
None of us had ever seen him with a book of any sort, so seeing him immersed in reading was a quite a shock. We could almost hear the tumblers in his brain click into place, one after another, as he unlocked the truth he had been seeking in all the wrong places.
It wasn't until I saw him months later - at a wake for one of the many cousins in that vast extended family (the only time these folks ever got together) that I began to realize the degree of his transformation. Somehow, our conversation turned to homeless people, and I said something to the effect that I felt badly that we couldn't do more to help them.
"Why would you want to help them?" he asked.
Wondering whether I'd heard him wrong, I said "Why would I want to help them?! Because they're living on the streets! Families! With kids!"
"Well, Jimmy replied, cool as a cucumber "that's their choice."
"Their choice? Are you kidding? Why would anyone chose to live on the streets of Boston in the winter by themselves, much less with kids?? Did the kids chose this "lifestyle?"
Well, you can imagine how this conversation went.
Yes, of course it was their choice. No, you shouldn't help them. Why not? Because they don't want to work. They'd rather live on the streets. You should let them. But we have an obligation to help those who are worse off than we are. Do we? Where do you get that idea? From my family's example. My parents brought us up to help those in need. Well, your parents were wrong. You're only making things worse if you do that. How could I be making things worse? You're upsetting the natural order of things. Some people are always going to fall through the cracks. That's just the way it is. The sooner you understand that, the better off you'll be.
It was only the ironic fact that a Catholic priest walked in and was about to speak that our distressing discourse came to an end. Jimmy, I'm sure, felt that he'd earned some instant Randian street cred in leaving another naive altruist in stunned silence.
Naive or not, I delight in my altruism. Indeed, my first diary here. I never attended church as a kid, so I don't come by this philosophy as a result of any religious teachings. I learned it from my parents, and from simply looking around in the world. Even in the animal world, as you can read in my diary linked above, there are examples of altruistic behavior for the good of the pack, the good of the species. To me, sharing my good fortune with others is the default condition, a natural part of being alive and living in a world where our human connections outweigh our individual differences.
So here I was, being lectured on altruism by a guy who lived at home, sponging off his mother, paying no rent, eating her cooking, driving her car, hanging out reading Ayn Rand on her couch in his 30's (when he wasn't running the same deal with his girlfriend). A guy who, thanks to government benefits, was able to stay in his childhood home when his father died (just like... oh, yeah. Paul Ryan). A guy who's only lasting stints of employment were with the Unites States Army and the Teamsters Union.
No, you didn't need no stinking handouts or help from anyone else, do you, Jimmy? You were one of those self-made men that we've heard so much about, the very sort of person that Ayn Rand was talking about. The sort of person who believed her with all their heart when she said:
“To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.”
So you were more than content to let the those homeless people fall through the gaping holes in the safety net. They weren't your problem, Jimmy. Once you read from those magical books, you moved on to some higher plain of existence. Oh, sure, it looked like the same house where you grew up (the house that your father built with his own hands), the same couch where you slept away the afternoons dreaming your Randian dreams.
I guess you must have missed it when Ayn said that:
"The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose".
It may have taken me a couple of decades to figure it out, Jimmy, but you
did have a purpose. You confirmed all I needed to know about the philosophies of Ayn Rand, who availed herself of Social Security and Medicare - albeit under her married name - despite her scorn for dependency of any sort. At the end of the day, even she didn't buy her own load of crap.
No wonder you (and so many people who haven't the will or the desire to wean themselves off dependency on others) adopted this perverted life-view as your explanation of the universe. It was so endlessly clever to imagine that you don't need anyone else; that other people were consuming oxygen meant for you while adding no value to the world. It was so courageous to watch in smug self-satisfaction, safe from Mom's house, as your fellow human beings succumbed to unemployment, foreclosure, illness, and homelessness.
It's been about 18 years since I've seen or heard from Jimmy. He hasn't crossed my mind until Paul Ryan's fanatical devotion to Ayn Rand came to light. Two young men from completely different backgrounds who lost their fathers in their early years and were able - with government benefits - to stay in their homes.
I hate to say it, Jimmy, but this Ryan guy's got the edge on you. I mean, yeah, the dude's been drinking at the Federal trough his whole career, but he's got a beautiful and successful wife and three great kids and he's in contention to be vice president. Of the United States. You'd like his budget ideas, though. If you're still underemployed, maybe you should think about working for his campaign. Just sayin...