A Little Loss of Courage

Merle Haggard sings a song he wrote, "Mama's Hungry Eyes", in which he has the line, "just a little loss of courage as their age began to show." Over the last several years, and especially as it applies to my own father, this line has hit home in ways that I never would have considered. There are often a lot of ways to describe a single series of events, and the poet that finds the most meaningful or tersest description certainly may own rights to the naming of that series of events. I think that Merle owns the naming rights to the events that I saw in my father, and am sure are repeated in the population over and over.

My father, like most people, was many people and I certainly do not have ownership of the total Clyde Moore. But, no one can deny that he was a driven man who saw the world as standing in his way. His central daily task was to use machete, fists, verbal assault, or whatever it took to cut for himself a way through that jungle growth that was composed of every kind of vine hostile to his ambitions. He was a fighter and his first thought about you or anyone else that he encountered was that you were put there to be outdone, outsmarted, out-fought, or outworked.

Sometimes I use the word "bully" to describe him. If you show me your definitions of a bully, then I can certainly show you how Clyde Parks Moore fit those definitions. The thing that bothers me so much today is that I can also show you those same characteristics in varying degrees in all his sons, including me. But, the word bully has such a limited scope, and omits so much of the man, that to just call him a bully would be unjust, and simply not sufficient.

So what happens when a man with the drive of my father finds that he no longer has the physical and mental prowess to meet the world on his terms and must subjugate his will to the will of others? What happens when he finds that it is not his drive but his undeveloped skills of negotiation that will best help him accomplish his goals? What happens when he has no choice but to wait upon others and their schedules to get the help he now has to have to simply get from here to there?

Before I go on with this, let me say that as my father was in the throes of his severe loss of abilities, just when he had to rely upon others for help, there were complicating factors with my mother and her condition that set up terrible clashes between he and I which should never have happened. But, I was the last person that my father gave up on bullying for a bunch of reasons, and those clashes happened. I am not writing this as some sort of absolution of my own sins. I should have been smarter, but I was not.

Nothing about my father's last years bothered me so much as his giving up on the courage that drove him for so many years. He began to surrender that courage at the age of 62 because the government had told him that they would be somewhat responsible for him at that age through Social Security. By the time he was 65, he had made the transition to retired, and he never pretended to be anything but retired in the 24 years he lived after that. The word retired carries with it the justification for the surrendering of courage, and so he let it slip away from him long before there was any physical reason for him to do so.

My father spent a lot of time in his years between 62 and 89 playing the role of the senior citizen. He traveled on buses with his friends. He attended a weekly meeting of senior citizens and served as its co-president twice. He and my mother developed friendships and got together regularly with others their age to play card and board games. He worked in his shop making all sorts of wood items, something that he was sort of a natural at doing. His work was beautiful. and imaginative.

For 27 years, that was my father's life, mostly because the government had set up programs that allowed him to lose courage, lose vitality, and lose desire to get any of it back. Those 27 years equals the total of the years of my brother and his son, who died early due to cancer. What Merle Haggard described as a little loss of courage, my father, because the government told him he could, surrendered as if he were going to be able to simply molt like a bug and take on a new and better skin.

The contrast with my mother was striking. She worked until she was past 80 years of age and was suffering from dementia so badly that she could not and did not desire to perform. She may have done so to earn the money they needed to live the life they wanted to live. She may have done it to make sure that I had workers. She may have done it simply to remain vital, but she did it. She never gave up on the person that she had been all her life. She never lost courage.

As we go through the wars to get this country back to working for its citizens by getting its citizens to work for it, we have to face the notion that there is some magic age when we define people as insignificant, but very worthy of our support regardless of the cost. We are wrecking our economy by sending $7 upward in our society for every $1 that is sent downward. This has to stop or we will not have a country much longer.

I have seen the forces within my own family to not only keep this up but accelerate it. I have watched, and participated, as rather than take on "family responsibilities" we relegate those responsibilities to the government. I have watched as my siblings denied the moral obligation to limit the taking of government money by allowing a natural death to happen. This is not a problem that "they" are causing. It is a problem that "we" are causing.

In an ideal world, I have no idea how my father's last 27 years would have played out, and I do not want to know. This is not an ideal world, never has been, and never will be. But, knowing that nature will create those conditions sooner or later which will lead to "a little loss of courage" why do we speed up the process? Why, if the government is going to get involved, is it not encouraging people to delay that process until nature demands it? Why do we give people the tools to give up courage early when those tools are bankrupting us?

God bless every one of you who is 65, or 70, or more, who goes to work on a regular schedule and maintains his or her vitality. My Aunt Lib, who also worked for me, worked on until she was about 87. She always said that if she stopped then she would just die. For her the choice was work or die, and she worked, God rest her soul. If only there were tens of millions of others out there like Aunt Lib, then we could get our country back. If only.....