There's a diary in the Community Spotlight at the moment by live2learn called "Some people call me the space cowboy." To me, it reads a bit like backstory in a Stephen King novel, a memoir tinseled with pop culture references, in this case period music, a mesmerizing evocation of time and place.
Released when I'd just become a teenager, Space Cowboy resonates deeply with me as well. My first significant relationship had begun and Dark Side of the Moon, Can't Buy a Thrill and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road filled the airwaves.
For many people puberty and High School were not pleasant times, but I mostly enjoyed them and they have steeped well in music-hinged memories. My mind makes strong links between music and events or periods of life to this day. One such connection involves the song "Watershed" by The Indigo Girls.
At the time I was working as a Vice President in a small pre-internet online information services company. I had joined the company when it was a start-up in 1985, during the last year of my second Master's degree program, in Library and Information Science. It was the year my wife, 6 year-old daughter and I had moved from a townhouse to our first real home in the burbs.
I traveled to and from work listening to an excellent college radio station, which at that time had "Watershed" and the more well-known "Hammer and a Nail" in heavy rotation. I considered them sister songs, having to do, as they both did, with moving beyond thought and deliberation to action.
I'd been one of those late seventies/early eighties hippies, buoyant upon the clouds of ... freedom that the sixties had fought so effectively to make both cheap and ubiquitous.
I was a liberal idealist, my head full of ... clouds of freedom, literature, psychology and philosophy -- what I later fondly referred to as the cosmic strikeout.
I'd been cavalier with grades. I had to connive my way into graduate school. Narrowly escaping a life in retail I dreaded, I became a tenacious scholar focused on achievement. I trained a laser on my professor's expectations and worked night and day to exceed them. By the time I entered the online service company, this fire for achievement was raging. Within fifteen months, I became an executive. "Watershed" came along three years later.
Working 70-80 hours a week as I'd had since entering grad school and seeing that translated into visible success, it was easy to feel both special and especially deserving. But, unlike most of my peers and the board members, I did have moments, not infrequent, when I saw through this. I attribute it to my liberal nature -- iconoclastic in that atmosphere, but somewhat masked by a keen entrepreneurial spirit -- and years of studying the human condition. And so it was that as I was catapulting myself up social and corporate ladders, I was also on a quixotic quest.
Compensation inequality was substantial, though a fraction of what it is today. Stock options were reserved for board members, senior management and a very select group of outside consultants and "key" staff. The class war was simmering. In 1987 I began lobbying my peers and the board to abandon tradition and distribute options throughout the company. There's no reason, I argued, that financial incentives should not work and be appropriate for and deserved by people at all levels of the organization. It was slow going but by 1990 the stock option program extended to the receptionist. By the mid-90s, when the internet took over, widely distributed stock options became commonplace.
While this stock option crusade was winding down in 1990, I was commuting, listening and singing to "Watershed."
Up on the watershed, standing at the fork in the road
You can stand there and agonize
Till your agony's your heaviest load.
You'll never fly as the crow flies, get used to a country mile.
When you're learning to face the path at your pace
Every choice is worth your while. -- Indigo Girls
And sometimes there'd be an Indigo Girls double-shot, with "Hammer and a Nail."
Gotta get out of bed get a hammer and a nail
Learn how to use my hands, not just my head
I think myself into jail
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.
I had been deliberating, scheming and "strategizing", against the persistent, crushing current of the need to decide and act, over and over through an agonizing, iterative process three years in the making. I could relate.
I struggled throughout the rest of my career with this organic sense of superior worth that I and my peers had, so easily rationalized by an exceptionally heightened, single-minded attentiveness to the success of the company, most evident in long hours. I lobbied to share my awareness of the very real, undeniable, vital, yet under-valued contributions of those "below" senior management. The fact that someone can be replaced, I argued, does not mean that they are of little value. Someone has to do their work, we cannot function without it, and they are doing it.
The 1991-1992 "Bush" recession. We had had two "restructurings": layoffs, salary freezes and spending cuts. Constant politically, often emotionally charged negotiations in what seemed like one long collection of musical-chair meetings behind closed doors. And scenes of ethical lapses that still haunt me.
When I finally left corporate America in 2000, it was in part to step away from the struggle on these terms. I had learned early on the lesson expressed in my sig.:
" One of the major differences between Democrats and Republicans is that the former have the moral imagination to see the moral dimension of financial affairs, while the latter do not. Some pragmatists are exceptions. "
I moved on to fight the battle on other fronts. (As one result,
I watched the 2000 election minute by minute underscore and escalate the War.)
As the Class War has ceaselessly, dramatically escalated since then, this train of thought has never left me. My direct experience with "supply-side economics" and the Class War as well as its responsibility for the Climate War drive the "concern", frustration and anger I feel and often express. As time passes, income and wealth disparity increases, the atmosphere fills with greenhouse gases, and the stridency of my thoughts, actions and interactions grows. These emotions clash directly with the existential resolution I came to decades ago: to treat people well and do my best to make their time here as pleasant and/or bearable as possible. My older daughter, now 28, has noticed the change. It's a conundrum.
We have made ourselves a watershed generation. The demands on us are different now. We brought this upon ourselves and our descendents. We've had more contentedness and convenience than we can afford. We have let the future down in monumental, historical ways. We're at the watershed, it is raging, yet all around is dithering, complacency, apathy, hopelessness.
It's time for agitation and discontent and inconvenience while we still can make a difference. Now only decisive, unrestrained actions will matter. To me, not doing so is amoral at best. This demands a clear choice to prevent massive suffering. My actions are based on this conviction.
"Somebody has to do something, and I think it's just pathetic that it has to be us."- Jerry Garcia
You know, I identify with this observation. We don't seem up to the task, do we? But we have to be, not just because we have a large responsibility for it, but because
there is no one else, and not acting in full measures, with the full measure of our beings is not an option.