Political Prisoner - Trapped In The Short, Unhappy Life Of Doing Good

Bob Muzelle looked out the bay window of his modest suburban home and over the small backyard - the old, rusting swing set, the untended rose garden, the bird feeder, and the rotting maple. 

It was not much, he admitted, but then again the fight for social justice pays no immediate dividends nor any compensation for hard work, long hours, and parsimony.  It is a fight that must be fought, no matter the consequences, the hardships, the deprivations.  It was an existential cause that had to be recognized. 

Bob didn't consider himself special - it was his duty, after all, as it was for anyone who saw the truth.  The warming climate, the persistent discrimination against oppressed minorities, rapacious capitalism, the arrogant trampling on civil rights, and the bullying foreign policy - all would not go away unless a concerted effort was mounted. 

He smiled as a cardinal flew to the birdfeeder, almost tipping it over as he pecked at the seeds, spilling more than he ate, a fine feast for the squirrels who would soon gather below.  Bob had worked hard to find and install a feeder that was squirrel-proof, but was happy that incidentally they got fed.  After all, why should he discriminate?  

Born and raised a Methodist - the Biblical injunctions of which he, no matter how ingrained his latter day secularism might be, could never fully forget. God notices the death of a sparrow, he remembered. 

 

Bob was now in his advancing years, well beyond most men's pull date, still in his traces pulling a heavy load.  Decades of social justice could not simply be packed away, shelved, and forgotten.  There was such a thing as moral inertia.  Once you started on a career of doing good, it picked up steam and was hard to stop.  While others retired to Florida, Bob tirelessly spoke, wrote, and acted in the name of progress. 

The N6 was filled as usual with young women on their way downtown, many to work for the new administration, others simply making their way and hoping for a break.  Washington was no different from Hollywood or New York where opportunity was everywhere but hard to grasp and harder still to hold on to. 

Bob smiled, wished them well, and as he did every morning allowed himself a bit of fantasy, what it would be like to be loved by one of these sweet young things, taken care of, admired, shown off.  What he wouldn't give to be years younger, to lean over the aisle, to join them, squire them...And there his daydreams turned to the inevitable luxury of imagining himself in bed with the most beautiful. 

The decades of good works were not without their limitations.  The progressive crowd had always been unpleasant and unkempt.  Since it was bourgeois to spend time or money on something as superficial as one's looks, by and by a certain ugliness became the physical zeitgeist of the movement. Beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed women such as those on the N6 would be looked at askance, not trusted, outsiders, a marginal, incidental bother. 

Bob smiled and remembered his days at Yale, his bright college years spent without a care in the world. The trips to Smith and Vassar, the long weekends on the Cape.  What was the name of that inn? The one with a white picket fence and a trellis of roses...? or am I imagining it, something I missed? So stock an image, it couldn't have been real. 

By the time the bus reached Farragut Square Bob had shaken off this allotted twenty minutes of reverie and prepared for the day ahead - LaShonda Evans from the Black Women's Caucus, Ahmed al-Zarqawi, Deputy Director of Free Palestine, Bobbie Benson, a former truck driver recently transitioned and looking for work in advocacy. 

Bob's wife was repeatedly asking him if he hadn't finally had enough.  A man who had given his whole life for the uplift of others deserved a rest; but Bob was adamant.  The problems facing the country, especially now that Donald Trump was wreaking havoc could not be ignored.  If there was ever a time for social activism, it was now. 

Yet, while that might be true, there is something about advancing age which makes such things less compelling, less important, less worthwhile; and Bob found himself distracted and uneasy.  

Death? The Great Void? Never had that thought been anything but a distant personal possibility.  Real death resulted from starvation, at the hands of Trump's gestapo, from viral infection, from earthquake, fire, and the rising seas, and had nothing to do with him, certainly; but yet there it was, hard to shake, impossible to come to grips with. 

'You've done all you could', his wife Corinne said to him in a particularly disconsolate moment. 'You have left a legacy', but the words 'Fuck legacy' were almost out of his mouth before he nodded and thanked his wife for her commiseration.  

On his way up the stairs long after Corinne had gone to bed, he said them out loud again and again. 'Fuck legacy, fuck it, fuck it fuck it' and shaky from the effort, held tighter to the bannister. 

The Yale Alumni Magazine was where he had left it on the night table. He picked it up and leafed through to the pages where his classmates wrote in about their lives.  Huntington Cabot was enjoying skiing at Gstaad, 'not bad for a man of my age', he added, 'but more suited to my grandchildren'.  

'Fuck him', said Bob. 'And fuck his grandchildren', which he immediately regretted saying in an act of contrition. Just because his life of social duty had been too important for Wall Street, a Park Avenue marriage, and homes on St. Bart's and Palm Beach there was no reason to carp about others' good fortune. 

 

At the same time there was no doubting his regret.  His office was no mahogany-appointed boardroom, his suits were not tailored and many, his wife was not exquisite, and he had no mistress, no cinq-a-septs, no affairs. 

LaShonda Evans came bursting into his office unannounced, full of something nasty, some issue about black this or that, racial umbrage, hatred of white people.  Her eyes, already her worst feature - yellowish, protruding, and set as far apart as her face could manage, were as wide as could be.  She chicken-necked a 'Whassup, muthafucka?' which was supposed to pass for congeniality but which Bob hated, and he gripped the arms of his chair waiting for it. 

This was not what he signed up for long ago on the Freedom Rides with Martin and Ralph, the halcyon days of racial integration, side by side with his black brothers and sisters marching across the Pettis bridge singing We Shall Overcome.  This uppity bitch was ruining his day like she always did and he wanted her out and gone, but  he had to sit there patiently while she aired her gripes and demanded action. 

'It's not too late to live a little', Corrine reminded him. 'We do have a bid on thatTampa Bay condo', her hedge against a life leading to the same airless, featureless place they had lived in for so long; and for once Bob paid attention.

The raggedy, ugly women of his social justice years were a fact, his choice, his community, his colleagues; and no matter how much he dreamed of the blonde young things on the N6 they were nothing but reminders of the emotional and sexual penury of his younger years.  'Wasted', he thought; but of course that idea had to be shaken loose or it would bugger him for all of his final days.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Donald Trump had not been in the White House destroying every last one of the pillars of social justice he and his colleagues had worked so hard to erect.  Had he retired during the Biden years when the progressive dream was still vital and very much possible, the condo would have looked very different; but now that the house of cards came falling down and his progressive vision had been erased, he was faced front and center with the fact of a life that had indeed been for naught, wasted, irrelevant when he could have been Huntington Cabot. 

When you end up with nothing to show for your life, where are you? and what are you? A historical cipher at the very least, an emotional pauper at best. 

'The Gulf shrimp at DiCarlo's is to die for', said Corinne, anticipating her first real night out in years and on the beaches of Florida at that.