A Million Worries

Dear Eugene,

There was a time in my life when fear was prevalent, "insecurity" something to deal with on a daily basis.

I don't think I was pathologically this or that; it's just how I took things from grown-ups, that life is full of threats left and right, and to live well is to keep addressing them.  One doesn't need to be ambitious to appreciate a healthy sense of precaution: just to protect your base is a call tall enough to engage in constant harm reduction and risk assessment.

One time I was with my in-laws, grocery shopping, one place and then another.  It was pineapple season, and my father-in-law picked one from the first shop, reasonably satisfied.  (He's not a stingy person, but getting a good deal is more reassuring than most other things in life.)  Then at the second shop he saw each pineapple selling for 50 cents less and declared--actually, decried--that he's been cheated.  He was tongue-in-cheek, I could see, but not very firmly, that too was apparent to me.

Suddenly the joy of a fair and equitable transaction turned into another familiar cautionary tale of vulnerable consumer in the hand of big corporation powerful enough to conceal and deceive.  It hardly mattered the two shops weren't even selling the same brand of pineapple, and more to the point the pineapples weren't even of the same size.  It's like you filled your tank and drove two blocks down and now it's 5 cents less a liter; a faceless evil is lurking somewhere but you lacked the perspective from merely two blocks up and now lost your base and hate yourself and curse the world for that.

I saw online a pending credit card transaction in my account just now and didn't recognize it.  Took me not long to come up with a good conjecture but still about 30 minutes to deal with it, calling the bank, calling the shop.  Not a big trouble, to me, but I imagined, for many people there could be no recourse, or, say, for someone like the seniors I visit at a care home, they wouldn't even know their base is eroding.  And that, I suppose, is reason enough for me to want to protect the dispossessed, to speak for the speechless, to make home for the homeless.

But let's go back, trace my steps from the last one I took: home for the homeless, I said.  What sort of "home" am I seeing?  What sort of secured existence do I envision to enrich the poor, to see to that poverty is no more?  Would 50 cents from one hand to another redress an imbalance of power?  Is a two-block foresight my vision of justice served?  Can my guarantee to an old man that he will never need to worry about another erroneous charge on his credit card bill now that I am the one taking good care of him the foundation of his lost trust reclaimed, the fountain of faith love and hope springs eternal?

Can a person die in a million-dollar home like a miser, fully "secured" in nothing but his own misery?  The sad answer is yes and often.

What finally saves us from ourselves, starting in the here and now?

Yours, Alex