Hello All: I recently got a private email from Simba where I was severely castigated for not writing anymore. I have been traveling and coaching and working, but...I have not been idle. I have been working on a series of essays. I sent this one to Jim Quinn's site, and he liked it so much that he's going to publish it. Here it is for whoever is interested. I hope you enjoy it today as Kimber is rising. All the best, Sitting Bull

Love and Bailouts

Ayn Rand's classic, Atlas Shrugged, contains a fascinating scene within which James Taggert, the brother of the protagonist, Dagny Taggert, complains that she, his sister, is not loving him well enough. She, Dagny Taggert, is wrestling almost constantly with a variety of philosophical questions throughout the novel, as would be expected of one of Rand's protagonists, but this one is of supreme importance to her. She wants to be a good sister. She wants to take care of her brother. She wants to love him, but she is having a very difficult time adequately doing so in light of his many and pitiful flaws. Indeed, he is somewhat of a low-life, a whining, little wimp who has basically, in this scene, reminds her of her responsibility to love him regardless of what he does because, simply, he’s her brother. Basically he’s outlining one of the oldest and, unfortunately, still honored entitlement programs of human history, the one tied to unexamined familial loyalty. “You’re my sister,” he states, to paraphrase, “You have to love me.” Her response: "You make it sound like love is something that doesn't have to be earned.” She may have said “deserved” rather than earned, but the message is the same.Is it not?

Growing up Catholic, I was always troubled by my mother’s interpretation (through the church) of God's love as being unconditional. “You mean God will love us no matter what we do?” I had asked her, I remember, on more than one occasion. “No matter what we do, God will love us," was always her response. Even as a small child, something about this didn't ring true to me. It just didn't make sense. There was an understanding somewhere at the core of my being that any valuable thing had to have a price of some sort associated with it. Valuable things had to have some worth, and things of worth just would not be given away for free. And what could be more valuable than God's love? My father had re-told me the story of the Devil’s fall from grace, as narrated by Milton in Paradise Lost, and how God once loved Lucifer perhaps above all the other angels. But his (Lucifer’s) fall from grace, his foolish, reckless and selfish ambition changed all that. Did God still love Satan? And if so, why, if Satan hated him so? An even more profound question came to my mind years later, as a young adult, involving this same question: If God did still love Satan, wouldn’t He love him more if Satan loved Him in return?

Another thing that my mother had taught me, another product of her Catholic upbringing, was that God did not play favorites. I considered myself Catholic for the first twenty-five years of my life. It wasn't until I was twenty-three years old that I first read the entire Bible and realized that it said, quite clearly, that God did and, I believe, still does, play favorites. God favored Jacob over Esau, and He favored David over Saul. God was always picking certain Biblical people to back both spiritually and financially and others to cut off from support.

This brings us back to the subject of love and Dagny Taggert’s question to her weaselly, sniveling little brother. What value is something if it doesn't have to be earned? Indeed. What about the love I have for my wife. Is it that I just take care of her because she takes care of me? My first instinct is to say, “No.” And truly, on a deeper level, I understand that such love in its highest forms embodies a type of selfless giving that is highly problematic to elucidate even with great mental effort. Whatever inner awareness that is that gives me a better understanding of it also reveals to me that it's not simple reciprocity. When the greatest limits of human affection or love are reached, one in the relationship inspires the other through acts of goodness and giving to achieve higher states of selflessness. However, as in all human relationships, there is always an exchange there, a type of commerce that cannot be escaped from or denied. And when such an exchange is occurring, there is always, somewhere in the psyches of its participants, a score, a record of commerce of some sort being kept. The higher the quality of the love, the deeper in the psyche such a record is kept, hibernating, not needed for protection or awareness of one’ s proper place in the relationship, but it does exist. It is always there.

When the selfless giving starts slowing down, that’s when the hidden record, the scorekeeping, starts making its way to the conscious awareness. One can easily tell marriages that are in trouble; the score -keeping is prominent, very near the surface, public. But even for those who are, as it is said, truly in love, it, the scorekeeping, once again, is always still there.

My wife doesn't love me unconditionally, and I wouldn't expect her too. If I did, what would there be to stop me from slowly starting to do the things that would be damaging to her trust? I like to believe that I operate on a higher level than the man whose largest concern involving sleeping with a women not his wife is how to get her out the back door before his wife gets home from her hospital job she does to support the family, but perhaps I don’t. Perhaps none of us do. Perhaps I'm a lot closer to the practice of my late father’s casual habits of adultery than I think. In any case, I have no desire to find out, at least not today. I will just keep giving, and everything will seem to run fine. I can keep the score buried in my subconscious mind for hopefully the rest of my life. Fortunately for me, my wife has a greater capacity to give than I will ever be able to match, so I don't see trouble anywhere down the road. But that doesn’t mean that one false step couldn’t bring a whole heap of it, i.e., trouble, very, very quickly.

Aren't things of value worth something? Aren’t they supposed to be? Can they be made out of nothing, out of thin air, so to speak?

I hate weddings. When asked why, I routinely say, “Because they will (the bride and groom) probably end up divorced anyway.” What a party pooper! I know. But look at the numbers. What's so important about a stupid, mostly meaningless ceremony? I’d rather celebrate a fifty year anniversary. Now, that's something! Even a ten year anniversary. That’s something, too, a celebration of action, results, output, not just potentially meaningless vows. Action and not just words. Do you know who makes a big deal out of that? A ten year anniversary or even a five year anniversary? The answer: No one. It’s just two lonely people, usually going out to dinner by themselves.

We love weddings and parties and empty things. All of us do. (Except me.) We love things that we don't have to pay for right away, stories where the characters will end up living happily ever after. We love such stories, and we’d love to be a part of such stories, provided, of course, that we don’t have to take part in all the grubby detail work that living happily ever after entails.

We love to be loved without loving back. It only makes sense that such a society of thinkers would grow to love other things where giving back is not a necessity, like bailouts. We love bailouts. Are you going to tell me we don’t love bailouts? Baloney. Sure we do, just not when we’re not the ones getting bailed out. People complaining about bank bailouts aren’t complaining because they think bailouts are wrong. They’re complaining because they’re not getting any of the money. Bankers aren’t complaining. Once again, we love bailouts. Bailouts have become a part of our culture. Kids don't get spanked. They get “time outs.” Why punish in a world where no one gets punished anymore?

Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten, that once out in the real world, mother nature doesn’t give time outs. When a grizzly bear is attacking you and your family and you don't have a shotgun to shoot it with, you can’t ask for a time out. This is a real life spanking, that maybe if you’d been cognizent enough to understand the laws of nature and man better, you would have avoided, because you would have been carrying a shotgun in the first place.

Abortions are un-Christian until you get pregnant; then things change. The same can be said for adultery. When you are the lonely one with the boner, rules can change, punishments can be forgotten about and maybe even done away with. When someone is an overweight, undisciplined tub of lard who has slowly lost control of his eating habits over time, taking a diabetes medicine for a “health bailout” doesn’t seem like such a bad idea all of a sudden. Why not just let the Chinese work a little harder, so that such people can use the money they loan us back after making so much of it selling us all manner of crap products to purchase a couple of total knee replacement operations? That someone is going to need those operations after existing on Hostess Fruit Pies and Big Macs and spending years mistaking Fantasy Football for a worthwhile experience on the Earth.

What a joke! Wall Street isn't to blame. We are all to blame. When our children get drunk and arrested, we go in and bail them out. There's no punishment. Why? Because there is no crime. We love them, and love isn't something that needs to be earned. It's just something everybody has a right to. And bailing people out is part of love. Not spanking, not discipline, not anger. Love is just something everybody gets. It’s like health care. It’s like freedom of the press. It’s like early retirement. It's the mindset we have. The money we make doesn't have to be earned. It just has to be printed. We deserve it, don’t we?