BETTER SELF? IF YOU HAVE A BETTER SELF, WHO WERE YOU BEFORE FINDING OUT?

 

 

Life mysteries usually get solved by our better self, the part we hope others notice because it’s better than the usual.

 

The mystery solutions usually fall between ‘Wow, I didn’t think I could do that’ and ‘Oops, I thought I could do that.’

 

One shocking example was Det. Mark Fuhrman during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The guy looked like he just walked off a movie set. The movie theme bled into a lawyer’s famous words, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”

 

Fuhrman was the better self the LAPD showed the world. It worked until he showed a different side.

 

Like Det. Fuhrman, it’s hard to know if someone is showing you their better self when it seems like they’ve got it all together from the beginning.

 

 

What we do know is there are those who don’t give two buckets of hog slop what they show, what you see, and the hopes and dreams of anyone else but themselves.

 

Whether it’s a boss at work, family member, or longtime friend, what are you supposed to do when they show you their worst self and keep driving it down?

 

You have a choice to make.

 

William Styron explored this in his book Sophie’s Choice where a woman had to, wait for it: choose.

 

Sophie’s choice was which of her two kids she would keep while they stood in a concentration camp line for processing. One would live, one would not live.

 

Getting caught between mothers and children in the wild produces harsh outcomes. What would a mother moose do if you crossed between them and their calf? A mother tiger? Rhino?

 

Bad things happen to people who stumble into situations between moms and their kids; worse things happen when they pretend it’s a normal part of the work day, just part of the job. They are lying to themselves and their future selves when they face other hard choices.

 

Sophie choosing one kid over the other was a death sentence. A guard in the camp ushered them along.

 

But what if the concentration camp guards all refused to follow the death sentence orders? They would have been replaced and found themselves in the shower line.

 

What if the official detainers on the U.S. borders all chose to help the moms and kids instead of following orders? How can a government employee do that?

 

Glad you asked.

 

I was a government employee when I signed up in the U.S. Army for two years. I showed up and followed orders, but only to a legal limit.

 

See, following illegal orders were not part of the gig. In boot camp we learned how the My Lai Massacre changed things.

 

If an officer says, “Go over to that trench and waste them,” we learned we had a choice. Instead of firing into a crowd of women and kids on full auto, we would say, “Do you mean open fire on full automatic into a crowd of defenseless women and children?”

 

If the officer says yes, we would say, “I’m cannot execute an illegal order, Sir. Shooting innocent crowd of people to death with a machine gun is illegal in this man’s Army.”

 

So I tried it out one night during a fire drill. I was the platoon guide, the soldier who stood in front of the platoon during formation.

 

This night a third of my guys didn’t make it down the stairs. They fell, ran into bars, broke bones. It was two thirty in the morning when the bells and whistles went off and the guys scrambled down the third floor staircase in their undies.

 

At the prescribed time the captain called for role in the assembled formation.

 

“First platoon, REPORT.”

 

All present and accounted for. Same with the second and third platoon. I was out front of the fourth when I got the call.

 

“Fourth platoon, REPORT,” the captain called out from the darkness on the other side of the formation. I didn’t say anything. He called twice more before the drill came out.

 

“What the fuck is the problem here, trainee,” he said.

 

“FOURTH platoon, REPORT.”

 

I didn’t say anything.

 

“Tell the man you are all present and accounted for, goddamnit,” the drill said.

 

“Drill Sergeant, we have guys laid out on the stairs bleeding with broken bones. They need help,” I said.

 

“FOURTH PLATOON REPORT. What in the hell is going on down there, Sergeant Easterling,” the captain barked.

 

“Tell him ‘All present and accounted for,'” the drill hissed at me.

 

“We are not all present and accounted for, Drill Sergeant,” I said quietly.

 

“SERGEANT EASTERLING?” the captain screamed.

 

“ALL PRESENT AND ACCOUNTED FOR, SIR,” he shouted.

 

===

 

My disobedience was corrected the next day when I was relieved of my Platoon Guide duties and humiliated in front of the troops when I screwed up a manual of arms drill.

 

Since it was an Army freaking boot camp the humiliation was part of training. But it seemed mean spirited, lol. The whole ordeal is mean spirited so it didn’t settle in permanently, just another incident to learn from.

 

The point I think I made was I had a better self and wasn’t letting the situation take it away.

 

What happens when the front line people on the border protect their better self the same way? They’d get fired. If enough of them got fired, managers and supervisors would come out of the office and replace them until new crews were trained and ready to pull kids for Mr. Trump.

 

How would that change anything? It might not. There was a young Army major, Colin Powell working the Vietnam War after My Lai.

 

From wiki:

 

On 16 March 1968, in the official press briefing known as the “Five O’Clock Follies”, a mimeographed release included this passage: “In an action today, Americal Division forces killed 128 enemy near Quang Ngai City. Helicopter gunships and artillery missions supported the ground elements throughout the day.”

Initial investigations of the Mỹ Lai operation were undertaken by the 11th Light Infantry Brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Henderson, under orders from the Americal Division’s executive officer, Brigadier General George H. Young. Henderson interviewed several soldiers involved in the incident, then issued a written report in late-April claiming that some 20 civilians were inadvertently killed during the operation. The Army at this time was still describing the event as a military victory that had resulted in the deaths of 128 enemy combatants.^[

Six months later, Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, wrote a letter to General Creighton Abrams, the new MACV commander. He described an ongoing and routine brutality against Vietnamese civilians on the part of American forces in Vietnam that he personally witnessed and then concluded,

It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. … What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated.

Colin Powell, then a 31-year-old Army major serving as an assistant chief of staff of operations for the Americal Division, was charged with investigating the letter, which did not specifically refer to Mỹ Lai, as Glen had limited knowledge of the events there. In his report, Powell wrote, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Powell’s handling of the assignment was later characterized by some observers as “whitewashing” the atrocities of Mỹ Lai.

 

Excellent relations for a better self?

 

All present and accounted for? What would your better self say?

 

What is this man’s worse half saying? “There’s the women and children over there. You know what to do.”