Sans Fig Leaf
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"How do you spell success?"
17 August, 2006
"What a waste."
"It's a real shame."
That was how a pair of church ladies of my acquaintence once described a friend of mine. The friend in question, Larry, had just finished playing and singing a song he had composed especially for the wedding of another friend. Larry was one of the most talented people I ever knew. He had earned dual bachelors' degrees in Music and Mathematics and was working on a masters in Math. He played dozens of instruments. He wrote music, fiction, and non-fiction with equal ease. He was friendly, generous, and an all-around nice guy.
Larry was trying to make a living off his music. He wasn't rolling in dough, but he wasn't a burden on society, either. He always had paying music gigs, which he supplemented by giving piano and guitar lessons, and occasionally substitute teaching. He probably would have been doing slightly better in a larger metropolitan area--I knew he had been offered full-time teaching jobs in districts in far-off corners of the state--but he felt obligated to look after his mother and two aunts who all had frail health.
The church ladies thought of Larry (or his life) as a waste for the simple reason that he was past thirty and had not yet married and started a family. He had seldom ever dated anyone for more than a month or so. I'm sure that his employment arrangements--a collection of part-time jobs and short-term gigs--contributed to that evaluation, but the thing I noticed in the conversation was that they kept talking about what a good father he would be: he had helped take care of his brother's children when his sister-in-law had been seriously ill, and he was clearly good at teaching.
My thought at the time was, what gave them the right to decide whether or not Larry's life was a failure? Particularly when there was no reason to suppose that he didn't have a long life before him?
Why should marriage leading to offspring be the sole criteria for deciding the worth of a life? I've known people who had married multiplie times, producing children with multiple partners, by the age of thirty-one that haven't contributed as much to their communties as Larry had.
Geneticists have calculated, even from a strict evolutionary viewpoint, that producing offspring yourself isn't the only way to get your genes into future generations. Two offspring of your siblings--or three or four from cousins--will carry as much of your DNA into future generations of the species as a single child of your own.
The more troubling issue is assigning worth to another person's life under any criteria. Larry is an easy example because he did contribute to the life and well-being of his family, friends, and his community. But that shouldn't mean that other people who hadn't accomplished as much as Larry are worth less.
There's a reason all the world's religions admonish us not to judge each other. Once we decide that some lives are worth more than others, then we validate the notion that some lives are completely worthless. If a life is worthless, then there is no reason it oughtn't be destroyed. That's a notion we can't afford to allow to flourish.
Because from someone's viewpoint, each of us is expendable.
Be life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
--David Starr Jordan
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