The Long View

Alright… gather ’round for some rose smellin.’

Emotionally, I have been a little more introspective than usual lately, which isn’t saying much, but I guess fatherhood makes you sympathetic in previously unforeseen ways.  I have recently been interested in interests, comparing and contrasting the self and the collective, and have realized my own loves, hates, and indifferences make me who I am.  Additionally, the scope of your interests helps determine where you are in your own life.

For instance, I love my wife and family (more daily), in addition to BBQ, light mists of rain about this time of year, driving about 15 MPH faster than the posted speed limit (whatever it may be), church bells, the reserved acknowledgment of one’s own heritage, the way a seagull at sunset leaves me in awe of man’s walk with God, Appalachian music, and conversely, the pouring of one’s soul across the fretboard and through the strings of a Fender Stratocaster, travelling the glut of effects at one’s feet, and out of a stack of Marshall amplifiers, and ultimately captured Live (!) on disc for my enjoyment.  I have specifically found myself loving, as a unit of currency, the dime.  Think about it.  The dime (barely) yields more worth per weight than any other coin.  A quarter?  Ha!  Give me three dimes any day.  I guess my frequent use of DC parking meters lately in my 4WD double cab pickup (ah, another joy of mine:  offending metrosexuals) has brought about this newfound admiration.  That’s just my two cents – or, for a fraction of the weight, you could have had twenty cents, ten times the wealth!  See what I mean?

Additionally, I dislike many assorted mundane things, such as litterers, the Wal-Mart exchange counter, Facebook, decaf (in concept and reality), and the existence of restricted areas in the U.S. Capitol Building (saying nothing of certain members of the current majority party).  Chiefly, however, I have come to loathe the gumball.  Not the smooth, chewy gumball from a machine, of which I am indifferent, but the spiky critter spat from the humongous gum tree in my front yard.  After mowing my lawn and dilligently picking these things up, thousands remain invisible to the eye, making for an unsteady walk across the yard, buried, trampled underfoot, after decades of negligence.  If you arbitrarily drop your hand any place under said tree, you can dig two, three, or four of these things up with your fingers.  I now consider a gum tree in the front yard of a potential home sale a bad omen.

In addition to the aforementioned confectionary gumball and speed limit signs, I am indifferent to seatbelts (I’ll wear them), and the feces in my son’s diaper.  I don’t look forward to it, but I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would.

Introspection Meets Retrospection

It’s here I turn to a popular issue of the day, torture and the Central Intelligence Agency. (huh?)  It’s easy to criticize the actions of our operatives now, as National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said, “on a bright, safe, sunny day in 2009.”  We forget to take the long view, forget to look back on what decided those actions.  Would I rip out another’s, namely, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s, fingernails to save a loved one’s life?  Absolutely.  Would I rip out a loved one’s fingernails to save another’s life?  Absolutely… and I hope you’d do the same for, or to, me, in that situation.  We fall victim, however, to the comforts of security and collective reasoning, and forget the past, looking fervently forward through a distorted lens.

Interestingly enough, however, this past century rendered a remarkable verdict on collective reasoning and its viability with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  As Thomas Friedman put it, the United States enjoyed the relative peace of unilateralism “from 11/9 to 9/11,” 11/9 being November 1989.  With hindsight, America should have been more celebratory, and perhaps a bit more retrospective…

Twelve years after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 2001, I would find myself (sleeping through class and) studying the Commonwealth of Independent States, those Russian satellite nations, at the Naval Academy.  I freely chose to research Belarus for a paper and presentation, fascinated by the Chernobyl nuclear accident and the high rate of death among its sanitization crew and nearby inhabitants.

Six years later, I would find myself (terrified and) testing the operational limits of my own Mobile Chernobyl as Propulsion Plant Watch Officer on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, off the coast of Virginia, in the same waters I had navigated from a more enjoyable topside position as Officer of the Deck on a Guided Missile Destroyer, some three years prior.  Time moves quickly in reverse as well as forward.

I say all this, because these diverse and adverse experiences made me who I am today.  Today, however, I sit in relative comfort as a Budget Analyst with little stresses besides those self-induced.  That these little things capture my fascination (i.e. gumballs, dimes, and feces) says more about my standard of living than do the items themselves.  I have found myself a casual observer of the world around me, perfectly content with who I am, but where am I going?  Where will I be in another five years, or twelve years?  Perhaps I should be a little more retrospective…

One of the first thoughts that raced across my mind while holding my newborn son in my arms minutes after he was born was that someday, he will probably be holding me like this, getting ready to change my diaper, and looking for a place to lay me down, for the last time.  Not to fret over, though.  Japanese Zen koan defines happiness this way: “Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies.”  It’s that order I find myself hoping for.