May Day: Looking at the passing of a friend, and a consideration of values
In the finality of death nothing can be resolved
I’m writing this post a day later than I wanted to. I intended it for May 1, for reasons I’ll explain in the post, but most of the text that I needed to include was in an email. And, for the first time I can recall, my email server was subject to a DDoS attack and I lost all access to my emails until today. So consider this posted on May 1, even though it’s May 2.
May 1 is celebrated as May Day around the globe. In ancient tradition, festivities on the day marked the beginning of summer. In more recent times, it came to be International Workers’ Day, following the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago, and subsequently a day for marshall demonstrations in Communist countries. Later that day evolved into Labor Day, as it’s celebrated in many countries worldwide today. But, unknown to most of the world, it held a special place in my own panoply of personal holidays which I came to have when I was in high school in the 1960s. In that personal holiday schedule, May 1 was known as John Gaffney Day, in honor of my close friend by that name, John Kevin Gaffney, whose birthday fell on the date.
John and I always had what could be termed a complex friendship. Friends, and yet competitors, a sardonic way of conversing, a skeptical kind of mutual respect. My first girlfriend lived in the same community as John, and he knew her growing up. And he made a point of stealing her away from me, just to do it, not out of any real interest in her. I tended to follow John about almost slavishly after school. One day, in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, I suddenly realized how I’d just been following him around and I announced, “I’m revolting!” To which John replied, “Yes, I’ve know that for years.” When I had my empire, the Franconian Empire, in high school, John was my Prince of Passaic and, as I recall, Prince of Warren, the New Jersey counties where, respectively, he lived and went to Boy Scout camp. There was incessant internecine rivalry between members of my imperial court, and John played no small part in that.
Politically we aligned in our early days, and together we campaigned for Nelson Rockefeller for Governor of New York. At one point John and I shared a house in Wayne, New Jersey, in our 20s, and he ran for township council. A memorable night was when he returned from some political meeting to find my girlfriend at the time sitting out on our front lawn with her suitcase. John was livid, how he was being embarrassed. He later told me he didn’t remember the incident. I never forgot it.
For awhile John and I both worked for the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights, the job he introduced me to and helped me get, my first real job after college.
In 1978, in Providence, Rhode Island, a drunk driver ran a red light and struck the car John was riding in. He barely survived the accident and wound up paraplegic and in a wheel chair, in which he remained the rest of his life. I often pushed that wheel chair, including up and down steps and up and down over curbs. It inspired me to try to design a wheel chair that can climb stairs. I think today there are such things.
John was my best man at my first wedding, in Quebec City, and we remained in contact through the subsequent years as he moved around the country and I moved around the country and then the world. Perhaps it was the zeitgeist of the 2000s, but our political views began to diverge, which by itself was no surprise. What was a surprise, what came as a shock more than a surprise, was when John announced one day in 2014 that our values had diverged. He disagreed, vehemently, with a position I had taken on some nominee before the Senate and he wrote me, in an email, “Most of all, though, I am saddened to see how far different our values have become. Or did I always misunderstand?”
I never felt our values had become different, even if our views on some things had. On March 12 of that year I wrote him in an email an exposition of how I did not see my values changing, at all, and I expected him to at least engage on that and respond. He never responded to my exposition, nor to a subsequent message, a birthday greeting on May 1, 2014, and it became clear that in his political zeal, in his very illiberal defense of his alleged liberalism, he had thrown 51 years of friendship on the dust heap of the same political division that was transforming and, in truth, destroying the country. I never heard from him again. And then yesterday I did a search, just on a hunch, and found he had died, of heart failure, on Easter Day 2020. In the finality of death, so much for that friendship, and so much for any denouement in resolving our alleged divergence of values or views or whatever.
I still feel it is important to state how, even if our views changed, our values had not. So here is my restatement of values as I sent them to John in March of 2014:
So you are sad to see how far different our values have become and you wonder whether you always misunderstood? I don’t know that our values differ all that much, even if our views do. But let’s take a brief inventory of my values and views “then” and “now”:
I was an advocate of the rights of the individual and openly challenged repression of those rights. Still am, still do.
I questioned authority and believed the government that governs least governs best. Still do.
I opposed violence, even in furtherance of one’s just causes: Still do.
I believed in fairness and equality of opportunity for everyone. Still do.
I have long detested “liberals” and their self-serving, half-hearted, hypocritical pretenses. Still do.
Even when I was religious, which I decidedly am not now, I detested hypocrisy, especially among self-proclaimed religious people. Still do.
I had respect for our Constitution and Bill of Rights then. Still do, perhaps more than ever.
I’ve always believed in a free, unfettered, and most of all independent press. Still do, and see its near-disappearance as the single biggest and most intractable threat facing our country.
I learned and adopted, then, Alfred North Whitehead’s precept that what a society needs is continual revolt, not revolution. And that is still what I believe.
I’ve always cut my own course and refused conformity to any one model or image. Still do, to the extent that I reasonably (and occasionally unreasonably) can.
Now I do think change is a hallmark of a living, sentient being, and so some things have changed, perhaps less in my value system than in my views.
For instance, I remember a time when I wrote “Bomb Hanoi Now!” on the envelope of every letter I sent, influenced by a certain John Kevin Gaffney, who urged me to put that on envelopes, as did he. I don’t think I would do that now, as I stopped doing it not too much after when I did it then.
I also remember campaigning for Republican candidates like Nelson Rockefeller, coincidentally influenced by a certain John Kevin Gaffney. I was a big supporter of John Kennedy, too (even though JFK would be considered a conservative today), and still am. I was led to believe that Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, was going to bring on the end of the world, and I have since come to see through that — to use a word in vogue — slander.
I’ve leaned Democratic and Republican at various times, but always considered myself an Independent, and I have never registered with any party in any state. I voted for, and against, when they did not live up to their promises, both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. I voted for Bill Clinton, and would again. I voted for both Al Gore and John Kerry, and have since come to deeply regret both those votes, not that I am any fan of George W. Bush. I voted for Bob Barr simply because I could not in good conscience bring myself to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain. Today, I mostly feel a pox on both major parties’ houses would be in order (though at this stage, more on the Democrats’ house than the Republicans’). If I identify with any political belief system, it would be libertarian (with a small “l”). And this perhaps best sums up the reality of my beliefs and values, if not always my views, all along.
I did go through a Socialist stage, it’s true. It took me awhile, but I eventually came to learn something about economics and human nature and thus to see how that economic and political system doesn’t work, though some elements of it can serve some societal purposes. I have come to often say, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I can tell you rich is better,” an expression I think I first heard from one — ready for this? — John Kevin Gaffney.
Do we see a pattern developing here?
By the way, if you want a cause to get behind and a petition to sign, here is one that I think embodies real injustice:
http://www.change.org/petitions/my-brother-was-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-a-nonviolent-drug-offense
Anyway, you’ll believe what you want, as will I, and if you choose to be sad, that’s your choice, though it’s on your account, not mine. Maybe that little inventory will at least help clarify things for you.
Your independent friend,
Frank
Featured photo, John Kevin Gaffney, photographer unknown; from Options Magazine, used under Fair Use.
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