First, there may be some scientific basis for cruelty. In
the nearly five billion years of life on our planet, the trait may have served
some purpose for allowing some groups to succeed in the constant need for
survival. During this “descent with modification” as Charles Darwin called it,
(he never used the term “evolution”) there may have been some slight benefit to
some abnormality in a particular gene that provide a slight step up the ladder.
Why? Perhaps it was a benefit to the tribe. Perhaps the benefit disappeared
long ago as have some other motivators contained in our genetic makeup.
Anyway, cruelty shows its ugly snout fairly often in
nature. Cats toy with dying mice. Some females of species murder their mates
during the sexual act. Most males desert their mates just after this act of all
acts. No less an amateur scientist than the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson warned us
against basing our morality on “nature red in tooth and claw.” At any rate, we
witness the cruelty daily in the news and the postings of unsocial media.
When it gets too much to bear, I listen to the music of a
man named Schubert and think of the lives of good, decent, generous people I
have known. And I am fortunate—blessed as my religious friends would say—to have
known many. One was a man named Bob Ashcraft.
Oh, don’t worry, you never heard of him. He was one of the
commonest of a class of common people I grew up with in L.A. (lower Arkansas).
They have a compliment in the south, “He would give you the
shirt off his back”. Bob Ashcraft would have. You would have only had to ask. A
common laborer all his life, living on subsistence wages, he didn’t have too
many shirts to give away, though. He did own an old black pickup truck and he
drove it all the years I knew him. He was the kind of driver, peculiar to the
rural South, who waved (his was the ‘two-finger flip’) at everyone he met.
He was kind, gentle, generous, and able to survive, intact,
a life filled with many trials, other than his poverty.
He saw a grand baby burned to death in a horrific accident in
his garage. He survived the tragedy.
His wife went bad and her actions graced the front pages of
the local newspaper for months. He stuck with her.
He fell victim to con men who stripped him of his life’s
savings. He moved on.
He had, as they say in these parts, neither a pot nor window
his entire life. He rose above it.
Why do I remember him? He was a fishing buddy. My dad worked
Saturdays, so Bob and I would load up an aluminum boat into his truck and head
off. No matter how miserable the weather, he would always start the trip with, “It
looks like a good day for it. They ought to bite today.”
He was a man who adjusted, it seems to me, to the many
situations life presented. I can’t tell you how many times, as we floated in
some Eastern Arkansas lake, among the cypress trees and dead snags, he would
say, “I ain’t getting’ a bite fishing this deep. I think I’ll ‘shaller” up a
little bit.”
I think often about this good and gentle man, of whom the
Galilean would have been proud, and who had none of the things society uses to
judge success. I think of how kind he was to take a young boy fishing and smile
through most days of his life. Then I think of the daily greed and cruelty we
see from those who have everything.
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