Reality Check 101

Opinion columns like this one are, by their very nature, devoted to values. Writers do what they do in order to defensively preserve accepted values or to offensively promote new ones. When it comes to moral, social, political or economic values, neutral ground is almost impossible.

My father died on Sept. 24. There is no more powerful place than the death-bed for exposing one’s values, as well as witnessing the results of living them. Because of that dynamic, September is now very personal for me. As most people my age, I have now experienced both the emptiness and fullness thrust upon the living by the values of the deceased. They generate either positive legacies or negative “leftovers.”

Leftovers are not necessarily the same as memories. Memories are real but they are easily manipulated, or altogether misplaced and lost. Leftovers are not so. They survive the dying to live on in the futures of the ones left behind. Leftovers represent all the “stuff” that materializes after the spirit leaves the body and becomes mere flesh.

I have now been in the presence of many “bodies only.” On five occasions I have been party to the life-death struggle — on four occasions watching the flesh-spirit break and once a preservation of a life almost lost. In all of those experiences and more, there has never been a body reinfused with life so as to come back to fix the leftovers. The left-behind must maneuver through the influences of past traumas; sinful lifestyles, abuses, neglects, rejections, bitterness and distorted realities. The impact of pre-death histories always shapes the rest of life for the living and their resulting journeys. Choices before death guide choices in the after and it is always impossible for a body to change anything after the deathbed.

The saving grace in all this is the ability to birth a new life out of old leftovers. The power to kill that new life is in the power of unchallenged evil and misguided choices. To grasp the grace, one must accept and act upon choices that enliven such scoffed-at characteristics as purity, righteousness, and unalterable truth. After all, it should be self-evident that only what is anchored in the absolutely reliable and unchanging can hope to survive the allurements of all that glitters for only one lifetime. In some cases, I admit that I’m not there yet, but I am still the one responsible for the choices and consequences that will remain after my body becomes mere flesh. The obvious question is: How long is it prudent to gamble with the possibility of bequeathing stale leftovers to others by unexpectedly dying with unfinished business?

Lest I be accused for forgetting broader significances, let it be noted that the principle of leftovers also applies to municipalities, counties, states and nations. The vitality of a people is rooted in what they have been given to work with out of the past and what is redeemed in the present, be it truth-based righteousness or self-destructive leftovers of an anything-goes morality. It is simply too late after they have lost their soul, died, to resurrect the what-should-have-been. Even despots gain their footholds through the consent of some and the inaction of others. By the same token, the possibility exists, as long as social disease has not damaged too much, for a birth of new life.

The question of gambling can therefore be asked of social/political entities as well. How long will they continue to toy with bequeathing rotten leftovers that could eventually kill them? Just as people survive or flounder with the leftovers, the key to national survival is in preserving our historical foundations and the choices made based upon those foundations.