My lesson in the knowledge of good and evil

The true test of wisdom, I am told, is knowing that you do not know.  By that test, I have just become more wise, and a sadder but wiser man.  But I am also renewed.

 I’m an old guy, older than any baby boomer, and in this world that is “Damn he is old OLD antique, aged beyond measure."  One Saturday evening I took up a risky pass time, reading at random. I happened upon a farewell oration.   Reading randomly is risky business, just reading whatever gets in front of your face, and doing it on purpose can give you something you do not seek. 

At my age it takes a leap of faith to buy three pounds of coffee.  You can't ever be sure you have time to use it all up.  Reading at random is the same, you cannot be certain of the time to digest what your have read, and I do wish my last meal to begin with a rich salad, followed by  lobster, steak, baked potato with sour cream and chives carefully steamed asparagus spears in garlic butter, with a fine wine, followed by a fine pastry and coffee brewed with pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water.  The farewell oration I started into was far from that.  I want to go out with friends and my children facing me with smiles that say we know you have run your race well.  I still  have time to do good in this world, I can still hold a baby and reassure him that life will be full of interesting sights and great adventures.  I can turn to the new graduate and say it takes more than luck to make a full life.  I can say the joy of learning grows just as maturity does.  The end of learning is the day you close your eyes for the very last time. 

This Saturday evening I started reading a farewell speech.  It was a Goodbye Cruel World kind of speech, dripping pessimism for the future.  No stories of roses and pretty girls or children laughing in the park.  I thought life had left nothing but a bitter taste and emptiness.  But I could understand his feelings.  I could even feel bitter and sad for myself, the last six decades have been rough ones for me, and my world.  We had The Big War, and Korea, and Vietnam.  We saw friends off at the train station, or the airport, hoping, often in vain, for their safe return.  We heard the songs,  "FIghtin' Side Of Me."  "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore."  "Alice’s Restaurant."  "Ruby." 

As these decades have reeled by the aftermath of war has haunted our streets our dreams and our homes.   At the movies we saw and the newsreels of the war in The Pacific and Europe, and watched, open mouthed "Victory at Sea" as somewhere a young man's mother could be heard sobbing for her lost sailor boy.  Deeper in our collective experience were the gas victims of the War to End all Wars, and  "The Red Badge of Courage."   We know well the price of liberty, and we know well the price of war. 

War that comes to us filtered through the lens of "Good Morning Vietnam" or raw in "Platoon."  We learn of tyranny in the story of "Cabaret" and of corruption and upheaval in "Casa Blanca."  We see the horror in "Bridge on the River Kwai," and whistle "Colonel Bogey's March."   Whistling past a graveyard does not take away the graveyard.  The rows of Crosses at Normandy do not pass from the conscious because we wish them away, they do not pass.   A velvet lined box with a medal of valor within is a weak substitute for a flesh and blood father, son, husband, lover or brother.  Small comfort for the living, less comfort for the flesh and blood that has turned to dust in a pine box.

The fortunate hold to their sanity with a memory of some tiny joy, and the knowledge that the fight was worth fighting.  Wisdom demands that the fight we join be a fight for some noble cause.  Some greater good. We are sensitized by the pain we feel, to the pain of others.

So as I randomly read the words of farewell, I saw an aged soul offering up wishes for better times to those left behind.  I saw the bitter anger and frustration of my generation.  I read the sorrow of a life that has left much undone, much still to be done but beyond doing.  I felt the bitterness of failure and saw the will for success surrendered.  What I read said that failure had spoiled the sweet satisfaction a full life richly deserves at its end.

I turned to my life’s cellar, and took inventory of the Last bottles of Summer Wine and wondered if my remaining stock  had turned to vinegar in the rack.  Some that I had uncorked on my journey through this life had been changed by the black tendrils of the mother of vinegar, but by and large they had been sweet and fine.  How tragic if the remaining jugs had all turned, leaving nothing but bitterness for the rest of my days.  The bitterness promised in the farewell I had burned into my conscious by taking a risk and reading at random. 

I returned to the grand gesture of farewell and read on.  No farewell to a veil of tears was this.  Not the sad goodbye of bitter old man, but the final expression of farewell to classmates.  A valedictory oration.  An opening door to the future, not the dark sleep of the grave, but of the beginning of young life.  Tears are unfaithful and inadequate for this dismay, as I read the words of a young man reaching for maturity, and his life to come.  Words from a young mind just beginning the great adventure that I have nearly finished. 

Surely this cannot be, my generation, and the generations before me could not have left to this youngster a world that was so dire and gray.  Where had we failed?  How could it be that his cellar contained only vinegar?  Had he opened a bottle of fine vintage on this day of his new beginning and found the black tendrils that speak of bitter wine?  Was I the mate to that mother of bitterness?  Did my generation leave such a bleak world for our children and their comrades on this tiny blue marble?  How could we have failed.  Did not my father's generation defeat the menace of the Nazis?  Was the fight of my generation to prevent and subdue the tyranny of Communism lost?

I think myself a fool.  I had failed to see that the evil we defeated was like Satan, not cast eternally into the pit of hell, but eternal itself and rising again.  The demon and beast that lives in the dark of every child's life was not a figment, but a reality.  The dogs of war were unleashed.  They had not died in the War to End All Wars.  The mushroom cloud of the ultimate weapon had not destroyed the will to conquer, it had, in fact, enabled a new kind of conquest.  Conquest behind the shield of mutually assured destruction.   The Four Horsemen had not stabled their mounts.

On that Saturday evening, I found the bitter vinegar of wisdom.  Evil is not dead at all, it is alive in each of us, held in check only by the power of generosity and good will  that is alive in the best of us.  It must be held in check eternally but it will not die, not yesterday, not today, and not tomorrow.  It is the destiny of everyone to battle this great Satan.  The price of Liberty is truly Eternal Vigilance.  Not only must each of us require that our Liberty be assured, but we must also forever assure the Liberty and Justice for all.  If Liberty and Justice are to be ours it must belong to everyone.
                   
We are bound by our humanity to guarantee life, liberty justice and property to all, not just to us, but to them as well.  By giving them, we grant them and the perfect right to them to ourselves.