Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 5:59pm
Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 5:59pm
Dark feet soldier past my window as viewed from the lower cabin of this second-to-last carriage of the soon-to-be 6:05pm Worcester Express. In Yoda-speak, silhouettes these are. Silhouettes of people like me just trying to get home, to get on with the next chapter in the seemingly endless story of our lives. But it does end eventually by happenstance, design, old age, poor genetics, or bad habits. My mom is doing okay for someone 84 years old going on 85 this summer, though even a ‘small heart attack’ is no cause for joy, and the fact that I am 35 years younger hardly much comfort.
With a short blast from the engineer we are underway to cross the sixty thousand wooden ties between South Station and Ashland Station. Again like last evening the coastal train runs parallel to us, though this time it starts close enough that the interior lights from our carriage illuminate the purple and yellow of the other locomotive just outside my window. And again like last evening the coastal train diverges into the night to become a string of fading lights.
Have I really traveled a thousand treks across sixty thousand ties? – sixty million ties since I began these commutes? – almost enough to circle the globe?
At Back Bay we lurch to an uncharacteristically unstable halt. Soon more silhouettes pile aboard – many more than usual. Even still, after just a minute or two, everyone finds a seat as the ponderous train makes for West Natick. I am just another passenger fulfilling my temporary role no different than any other passenger aboard these carriages as we lumber into the night.
Tonight the young guy who runs this end of the train is having some extended discussion with a nearby passenger over the price of tickets or some other routine peeve – I can’t quite hear. The senior conductor soon arrives and the problem is quickly resolved.
Besides knowing how to quickly resolve a ticketing issue, I can sometimes tell the difference between the old timers and new comers by how they handle the lurching shifts and turns as we ride the ancient World War II vintage rails. The new recruits stumble from time to time like I do when I head for the door, but the old-timers walk along like the train never left the station. I suppose this is the railroad version of sea legs.
I’m stuck on the word ‘staunch’ tonight – as in ‘staunch conservative’ or ‘staunch liberal.’ Those with open minds willing to weigh the issues and decide matters for themselves are rarely considered ‘staunch’ about anything, since by definition the application of staunchness implies a closing of the mind, a toeing of the line, a no-questions-asked high-command top-down way of looking at the world.
Members of secret societies are staunch about their allegiances. Mafioso mobsters are staunch in their loyalty to the family and its goals. Worker bees in the hive are staunch about their orders from the queen. So perhaps that is why the word ‘staunch’ is such a foreign notion for me, since I do not toe the line unthinkingly, or out of unquestioned fear, or out of the special benefits it may offer me as a member of any inner circle.
Nobody is staunch about the public good of all. People are only staunch when professing loyalty to one’s own narrowly defined clan – often to the detriment, abuse, and subservience of other groups and individuals who refuse to toe the same line or recite the same pledge of dictated allegiance. Staunchness is a mantra of loyalty displayed publicly as a declaration of affiliation no matter how absurd that mantra may be.
Staunchness is also perhaps one of the greatest of all great evils because of how it enlists the weak-minded and fearful to follow a mantra even when the mantra stands against the well being of these particular individuals, their families, and communities. It is the voice of an intimidating authority that cares not to make the world a better place nor speak with any intention to tell the truth (or even bother to tell a lie for that matter). Staunchness is simply the method by which carefully crafted messages are tailored to enslave those easily manipulated by well-engineered catch phrases, slogans, code words, and false invocations of hope.
Was my dad a knucklehead to recite his own collection of mantas – or was he merely swallowing institutional factoids to keep him feeling safe? Despite his strong predisposition to side with those having authority over him, perhaps I should cut some him some slack. After all, even though his stance left me feeling abandoned to these powers, it also gave me a chance to understand how a great mind can be enslaved and how there is no need for it. Dad was staunch in most things because he was fearful, not because he was full of evil.
And it’s a lot harder to be angry with somebody for that.
As I have said, I am feeling more kindly towards ordinary individuals these days, but I still have an axe to grind against those insatiable institutions willing to say or do anything to gain further advantage over the fearful – among whom pay the highest prices for this power in the time-honored tender of human labor and human blood.
