FEAR AGAIN | 2006-10-15
I am trying to think of a topic that will get you talking. You, like any human being, want to sound profound, but that is not what I am looking for. It may sound sexist, but in this respect you cannot beat a mature, intelligent woman.
Shari and Elizabeth say what they are thinking about. Shari is too modest about her thoughts to suit my taste, but that doesn't keep her from simply saying what is on her mind. Elizabeth will go on about her family or other personal things, but there is always a point I can chew on. The average male ego would rather die than say "merely" personal things.
Women's Lib would be deeply offended at my making a general remark like this about women. But I have yet to find a single thing a man can say about women that Women's Lib is NOT offended by, so I am interested in the Elizabeths and Sharis who would hunt me down and mount my head on their wall if I called them Women's Libbers.
To return to my original topic here, I am trying to find a topic that will get you talking. I got some good stuff out of "Fear," so I'm going to try it again.
Let me risk saying that almost every member of this seminar has some fear about money. Let me give you some background on that.
One biographer of Teddy Roosevelt talked about Theodore Roosevelt's cowboy days. He said Teddy was a good, brave man out on the range and he was fearless in fighting during the Spanish-American War. With good reason when Teddy dealt with cowboys and soldiers, he considered himself "one of the guys." He was hurt by the fact that he wasn't fully thought of that way by his buddies, and he never understood why.
This biographer had a terrific insight on this. The writer said that Theodore Roosevelt was considered to be a brave, highly skilled man and a good friend by his fellows, "But he never shared with them the daily, humiliating fear of being without MONEY."
Roosevelt's father was proud of this fact: "I have left enough money to my son so that, if he is not profligate, he will never have to work for a living." It wasn't just that Teddy inherited money. There was also the fact that his father never expected him to ever have to work. He did not have to earn his father's respect by striving. His family did not require him to EARN their respect.
That is a million miles from where his buddies lived. That is a million miles from where you and I live.
Another example. A WWII vet in the program was leveling with me. He had lots of combat experience in the Pacific Theatre and he had the medals to prove it. He told me about an island where he and other vets spent some time when they were not in actual fighting. The island was under the command of a particularly obnoxious colonel.
That colonel was no coward. That colonel who was in command and everybody else there had been in combat, plenty of it. But the colonel had one awful habit. When he got drunk at the officers' club, he got mean. He would bang into people on purpose. Nobody dared to object to it. Finally one of the combat vets there actually knocked the hell out of him for it.
The guy who knocked hell out of hte commanding colonel went to military prison. The man who was talking to me admitted that if he or anybody else had gone to the court martial and testified as to how that colonel acted, their fellow combat veteran would not have gone to prison. In fact, the colonel would have probably been up on charges.
NOT ONE of the defendant's beloved, loyal buddies dared to testify for him! There were dozens of them, but not one of them had the courage to speak up. This was something the vet who was talking to me had kept inside himself for years. He said I was the first person he had ever admitted it to.
So why didn't these brave combat officers save their buddy from prison?
The reason was that none of these officers who chickened out had ruled out the possibility of remaining in the service after the war. Testifying AGAINST a senior officer in a court martial would put them in the same category as a doctor who testifies against other doctors in a malpractice suit. There are no legal penalties against it, but it can be suicide for a career.
They had ALL shown heroism in the nasty fighting on Pacific islands. None of them would have hesitated to risk death or lifelong disabilityto save their buddy's life in actual fighting.
But NONE of them had the guts to risk his career, his MONEY, for a combat buddy in desperate need of their help. They had all been through the Depression, and the idea of hitting the job market at the age of thirty or forty with no non-military skills scared them so much that they let a buddy go to prison rather than risk a possible military career.
So it makesme sick to my stomach when these same WWII vets would tell me that nobody knows REAL fear unless they have been in COMBAT.
Bullshit.
I have been shot at, and I have faced the prospect of losing my high-paying job and hitting the job market at age forty. Getting shot at is nothing by comparison.
And THAT is what Theodore Roosevelt simply could not understand or empathize with.