It’s a badly kept secret that most of the men in my life up to this point have claim to the lion’s share of the rotting carcass that is my trust in human beings. More accurately, my trust that human beings aren’t completely self-serving, earnestly narcissistic asshats proudly wielding a very large shield of delusion that they are “good” people. But is it fair to lay all the blame at their feet? At what point do we have to pick up what’s left of the bones and claim responsibility for it being dead in the first place? If we’re the ones that let our trust die, should it be up to us to revive it? Or are we better off without it at all? Trust is dangerous. It makes you vulnerable. It gives another person power to affect you and your life. And history, along with the application of a simple logic problem, tells us that betrayal can only happen if first there is trust. If, however, you assume that everyone is going to make decisions and base their actions on how they can achieve the greatest benefit for themselves, your world gets much, much simpler. Less pretty, to be sure, but simpler.
In the immortal words of Captain Jack Sparrow, “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do, and what a man can’t do.” Now there’s a radical piece of bald truth. Morality, Ethics, Right and Wrong, all of those things can be excused or rationalized or subjugated to our will as the need arises, as it has throughout the history of humankind. It used to be “right and proper” to marry one’s first cousin in order to keep the blood blue and prevent any possible mongrelization of the family line. Just because we’ve dropped the inbreeding doesn’t mean the world is any better off. Just ask mainstream media journalists, or literally anyone on any social media outlet. People go to great lengths to show the world their Greatest Hits and hide the flaws, only showing the very worst versions of themselves when they think they can get away without reaping any negative consequences. Rapists get off with a warning as long as they’re presented to the world as white, athletic young men with a bright future and their victim was wearing a short skirt, which everyone knows is a universal signal for consent, regardless of sobriety, age or actually saying the words ‘no’ or ‘stop.’ See what I mean? Right and Wrong are figments of the collective imagination that only seem to apply to those who’ve been conditioned to follow the rules or are smart enough to understand that society does not benefit as a whole from people who are self-serving or lazy.
Before you rage quit this page and move on to the next piece of celebrity gossip or POTUS’s latest embarrassing display, let me be clear. I’m not being overly reductive of the human race, and I’m also not lying. Humans are all self-serving, and they all want to believe that they are doing something good or worthwhile with their lives. Every last one of us. What it comes down to is this: priorities. What is most important to a person varies from human to human as often as hair color on Nikki Minaj. Everyone wants something different, dreams a different fairytale dream for her life. Some people want to be famous, some want to live simply and independently, and some have no vision for their lives whatsoever. Some actually do want to be “good” people and help others, but again, there’s an emotional payoff for them to do good things because it helps them believe good things about themselves. No one gets out of bed believing they’re shit, and they’re right. They’re not. Confused? We humans like to have a nice, tidy definition of ourselves, the world around us, and our place in it, but only the truly stupid believe that those definitions explain everything. So if we’re surprised when people do shitty things to us, it’s because we chose to place our trust in them in the first place. So is it their fault, or ours? The answer is both. When we can accept that we believed too much in their goodness and trusted that we would be exempted from being hurt, that’s on us. When they do something shitty that betrays the trust others have placed in them, that’s on them. The trick, according to The Who and the greatest man I’ve ever known, is not getting duped twice. (1: “We won’t get fooled again.” 2: “There ain’t no education in the second kick of a mule.”)
Bright spot in all this misanthropy: there is one man, one in my whole life who has been both present and active since I was a neonate, and has never broken my heart. Not once. I bonded with him when I was a newborn before I bonded with my own father. Mom liked to tell me that I was not a very good sleeper, but when he held me on his shoulder I fell asleep and he sat there, completely still, for six hours until I woke up. I was even supposed to be born on his birthday, but I arrived a few days late. When I was a kid, he was ten feet tall and could move mountains with one hand, then turn around and take me and my brother and sister to Chuck E. Cheese’s and wait with endless patience while we played noisy games and ate pizza and watched the animatronic stage show. There was never a problem he couldn’t solve, no end to his deeply-grounded wisdom or the number of crepe-y crinkles next to his eyes when he laughed as he told stories. Along with all the other impressive laurels that rest on his mighty shoulders is my hope that Prince Charmings do still exist and that one day I might find another one somewhere on this big blue ball (spoiler: I have).
And now he’s ninety, and the cancer is consuming his body like locusts in Egypt. And I’m being forced to watch him waste away because the cancer makes him not thirsty or hungry, and I can’t help but feel that I should be doing more than bringing him organic soups and powdered protein and electrolyte mixes for his water because he’s on a liquids-only diet. The one and only time I’ve ever seen my superhero get so much as teary-eyed was the day I left for college and he told me he was proud of me. He’s the only person on the planet that has never fallen off the pedestal I put him on. And now he’s human, fallible and bright-eyed as his mind and body wither unbelievably quickly, despite his insistence that he feels alright.
I want very much to blame someone or something, anything at all that can be a punching bag for my disbelief and anger because superheroes deserve better villains than rampant cancer that is literally strangling him. As much ammo as I have to lob at the people who, in my eyes, are very much deserving of the aforementioned emotions, the bottom line is that there was only ever the one superhero in my life, and the people who are left who should have been taking care of him the way he took care of us have served up very little outside their usual self-serving blindness. Another radically bald truth is that everyone has their own problems, and everyone is concerned from waking to sleeping with the solving of those problems. They have the right, but somehow while everyone else was so busy solving their own problems no one was looking closely enough to see that my hero was getting sicker and sicker until it was too late. It’s my fault, too. I should have done more than just tell the other “grown ups” that something was wrong. I’m a “grown up” too, so isn’t it on my shoulders just as much as theirs that no one did more to help? Aren’t we all just as responsible for the things we don’t do as much as the things we do? But I relied too much on the ability I thought the others had to make “things” happen to help. I trusted that they would feel the same level of gratitude and admiration for the man who did so much for our family and that that would be enough to motivate them to get “things” done. And hearing that there’s nothing that could have been done because it’s a fast growing cancer only pisses me off more. There had to be something, right?
He’s not gone yet, but he’s far enough gone that I know the likelihood that he’ll be around for the two things I was still, maybe foolishly, hoping he would be around to see gets smaller every day. It gets unlikelier every day that he’ll be there to see me get married, much less walk me down the aisle like I dreamed he would, just like it gets unlikelier every day that he’ll see my first book published, or if he does that he’ll be lucid enough to know it and be proud of me one more time. And the pain of knowing that no matter how many tears I cry or pleas I make to God, the gods, the universe or any other power higher than myself will make no difference in the speed with which this cancer will take him from me. I feel like there should be someone to blame, and maybe what everyone else has said-that there isn’t anyone or anything to blame, that this was probably always going to happen no matter what-is true. But right now I want it to be someone’s fault that the last, maybe the only, real superhero is being taken away from me before I’m ready.
Thalia Huntley 