Right attention

...Before running into a in their mid-nineties...

...If you have to live to be that have, but you seldom really encounter...

...History at University College, Dublin...

...And what come from paying the right sort of atten- wards something better...

...Human beings, alas, tend to be terror wholesale and terror retail, and a lot of "Let's stay- better at remembering the ills they suffer from than those they alive-by-supporting-whoever-looks-like-they're-winning to- inflict...

...A forty-year-old boss who fore that...

...For fascism, in the form of leaders society...

...school who throws his weight around My grandfather died in his mid- A couple of years ago I attended a high may command a certain amount of fearnineties...

...Not and dreams...

...When I was little, age was strange and never seemed to have anything to do with I N THE small church I attend there are The other is quiet and retiring and has my life other than offer an inconvenient two very old men...

...It is time to prepare threatened from within and without...

...many of the "new nations" of Europe and Asia during the The point is that they never were...

...Fascism, on the other hand, will be all-too-relevant, very reproduce abstract information (the "right" input always get- often, for either our humanity or for our political taste...

...A senior in high was good was very good...

...He is plainly a life-long extrovert...

...nations" still learning how to be nations...

...which involved grown-up bad breath and old it would be good to do it as well as The serenity of the old is too often the whiskery kisses, and occasional boring they seem to have...

...guys, all macho, in high school had now erly and more because time has worn What was said was the same, and the way become gentle and genial, helped along them away...

...That hope is shaken when ever, we would see one another again...

...Add a racist ideology to this picture, a fear and our side at all . . . and then to back off from the action hatred of more-or-less easily identifiable and punishable furiously protesting that we weren't ever really in favor of all "others," and nation-building and national strength can bethat at all...

...But which was in some way our job (that is, What is clear, though, is that his life was something more than a shift from one the job of the listening younger people) to a complete one, and he had lived it in a stage to another happens here: the maturpass on...

...aged serenity, not necessarily contradic- decades - it doesn't seem like so much 1 S August 1986: 423 time now...

...tried to learn, but with lessons handed to sed he had been, and how nothing could That made me examine the way I had me, sometimes against my will, by the repay that blessing...

...Abstract and inclusive nationalities such as that of the trying to make their countries strong by any means available United States will remain the decided exception...

...The future may well belong to racist dictatorship in Angola or Afghanistan either, where Soviet cognoscenti rather than to the ideological universalisms of Rousseau or delude themselves into believing that they have created "New Marx...

...separates me from my image of age, the pleasant way, and plays with the chil- Here you have both aged liveliness and one formed in childhood, is a couple of dren...

...Now They are as different as they could be...

...timentalizing this...

...Not in Vietnam or Cam- course of this century is to confuse probabilities with desires bodia or Iran then...

...To assume that large or villains (whoever they happen to be at any particular mo- segments of the third world will not search for fast-paced ment) are "no longer deserving of our support" because they achievement and tend to follow a fascist path earlier trod by are no longer playing by our rules...

...time, which surprised me...

...Peoples" almost instantaneously, thanks to a lot of education Americans will ignore this stark and unpalatable truth at in the ideological finer points - and, of course, a lot more their expense...

...To ignore realities like these is to cheer for the good produced which can fuel the engines of nation-building like guys on "our" side . . . until it is clear that they were never on none other...

...I knew, from This can be seen more clearly in the old, what some of the people who had been whose age is an obviously good thing, taking care of him said, that he was fre- than in people who are, like me, in their quently lonely, remembering my grand- forties...

...Or to discover suddenly that the third-world heroes come comparatively quick achievements...

...My aunt and uncle which has an edge of violence and crudeI realize now that one thing which lived close by and had seen all the best ness, about adolescence and youth, and it seemed to characterize age was a clear and the worst of my grandfather's last is no doubt necessary for getting young pattern of conversation and concerns, a weeks...

...This was part of the way some of way which allowed him to know it as a ing process, in allowing (for example) my older relatives acted, anyway, and blessing, and be grateful...

...He suffered from Parkinson's years because I had hated high school: does the same thing may get fear-based disease, as well as the rigors of living who wants to go to a celebration of the results, but he is properly seen as a fool, into an age most of us can't imagine, and Good Old Days at the Gulag...

...If in some ways I am, like the it was said was different...

...Both times he that way by marriage and fatherhood men I met at the high school reunion, a talked about how important a good mar- and, more, by understanding that they better person than I was when I was nineriage was, and how blessed I was in my really didn't have to act a role which once teen, it doesn't have to do with anything I marriage...

...He talked too about how bles- seemed so important...

...One of the If some things which irritate me about We talked a couple of times before he most pleasant surprises was to see the myself go away, it will probably be less died - once two years before his death, way men who had felt the need to be hard because I have disciplined myself propthe second time only a few weeks before...

...note: this last sentence is an aphorism and that I am in my forties I have an inOne is sly and funny, jokes easily, takes is to be copied down in your special between status: I know now that what an active part in the liturgy, flirts in a notebook before it gets away...

...Would-be and exercising an all-important unity of command at the cen- nations are much too concerned with short-term survival to ter, will remain a constant resort in the many regions of the care very much about, say, the Enlightenment ideas and ideals third world...

...we see the evils that can hit the old (the The second time he said many of the poverty and loneliness of many of the same things, in a way which made it clear old, for example, or such horrors as Althat he had not only arrived at a peace and zheimer's disease), and it is evaded when acceptance that had not been apparent we use stupid euphemisms like "senior before...

...Racist ting you the "right" output) is no less dogmatic gush than the dictatorship has been, and will remain, a constant in human teachings of a Qaddafi...

...KIM McQUAID Hatred, as a Mussolini or a Hitler or a Tojo well understood - and as a Khomeini or a Qaddafi understands now - is a (For the past year, Kim McQuaid was Washington Visiting much stronger short-term glue than love...

...whom lte had a long and good marriage...

...Or a natural rights/ Professor of U.S...

...not in Nicaragua or South Africa now...

...The first time he told changed...

...There is that men to become more gentle and less viowhile all of what got acted out and said clarity in some old people, and it may lent, has been an evolution upward, towas not good, much of it was...

...Both of them are that radiating serenity which you some- barrier to fun...

...me these things he wept...

...It thority which came from knowing how is good, though, to see some signs - as I close death was, and there was not the do in the old men at church, and in my same sadness...

...When hatred is wedded to fear, a combination is day...

...There is an intensity, one passage of time and what it has to teach...

...wishful thinking of the young...

...Democracy, as Americans know it, and classimilitary power...

...I can't say what that grandfather's last years - that time can means, only that something was there be merciful and illuminating, that lives which was not there before, and there is can become deeper and clearer with time...

...It was easy for me to read lessons people through a very hard time of life...

...These are areas where socio-cultural, political, that made both modern democracy - and modern democratic and economic cohesion of any sort is a process constantly socialism - possible in the first place...

...But it can be seen even there, in mother and his dead brothers and sisters...

...I wasn't sure when, if time's mercy...

...But I realized too that I might be senCommonweal: 424...

...Both are in times hear that old people are supposed to cousin's backyard I had to run a course good health...

...tion to life...

...some small ways, and there is something When I left him that first time everyone hopeful and providential in examples of was weeping...

...his wife had died two years be- school reunion, something I resisted for based respect...

...To believe that habits of mind like democracy cal Marxist-Leninism, as Communist nations sometimes try to or democratic socialism (or even Soviet-style Communism) apply it, are largely irrelevant to much of what will transpire in can be imported into a third-world country and put to work the the third world for the remainder of this century and most of the way that a computer can be programmed to store, process, and next...

...My wife and it is time that has made his foolishthe sadness of missing someone with wanted to go, though, and we had a good ness apparent...

...I know that they know things I do not know yet, and they know them from a RIGHT ATTENTION perspective I will not have for years, if I REFLECTIONS ON TIME'S MERCY ever do...

...Take dinner table questions about school...

...If desire to get something across, some- and parables where they might see some- it diminishes with time, the reasons are thing which should be passed on and thing more difficult and complicated...

...Of several minds: John Garvey tory things...

...something good about the fact that the JOHN GARVEY same words, words which the first time came from deep emotional sorrow and involvement, were now said with what seemed like a peace and clarity and willingness to wait and accept the death which was obviously not far off...

...he said these things with an au- citizen," or treat the old like children...

...physical as well as psychological...

...I have noticed that these two old men sit together often, as different as they are, watching what everyone else is doing...

...Or Hegelian dialectic sion, hypocrisy, cynical power grabbing and re-grabbing, and the labor theory of value...

...They are, in other words, ourselves for that grisly, tragic, but also likely fact...