Heroes

I'm trying Ringo; I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.

The holidays here at Chez Hillbilly

I hope that all of you are having a wonderful holiday season this year. There’s been an awful lot of suck in this foul year of our Lord 2024. Plenty enough, to be sure, to go around. But the holiday season has been great here. All the best wishes from me and mine to you and yours. Subscribers should have received our holiday greeting and special holiday edition of Science Friday. Cheers! Now for the penultimate column for 2024.

In my lifetime, the holiday season has become synonymous with egregious commercialism and it’s nefarious stepchild, televised holiday spectacles—these two in a decades-long symbiotic orgy of commercialism. This season, my favorite TV ad that crops up in NFL games is the Uber Eats spot starring Matthew McConaughey, Christian McCaffrey, and Jerry Rice. In the ad, McConaughey proposes to McCaffrey, while watching an NFL game, that football is actually a conspiracy to feed everyone's hunger.

The reason that I find this ad funny is that the ad agency writers aren’t laughing with us; they are laughing at us—right to our faces. Every professional sports franchise exists primarily to market mostly useless stuff under a patina of fandom. The rah rah in professional sports has been a sideshow to blue pills, alcohol, and gambling for a long time—even in obstensively non-professional collegiate athletics.

There’s simply only so much suspension of disbelief over stuff like this that I can tolerate without a Chernoybl-style meltdown in my noggin. Most of the tripe on TV would exist, without commercials, for about as long as it took for the besuited hucksters who run networks to figure out that almost no one is interested in paying directly for it. Entertainment executives are vampires whose sunlight is creativity and quality who can pass for humans only so long as no one gets very close. What they can do, as long as they stay in the shade, is cipher figures like savants. That’s why TV is such an outhouse. If it makes money, it airs. Quality? WTF is that?

I’m in this just as much as you. Despite my allergy to bullshit, I’m not immune to the lure of sports on the tube. I love my Detroit Lions. I just limit my love to the players and coaching staff and ignore ads. I don’t need no stinking blue pill.

A staple of holiday TV specials is the ubiquitous salute to heroes. This moment of grace lends a veneer of respectability to otherwise entirely commercial endeavors. Normally this comes in the form of tributes to the military and first responders. Mostly, I’m down with it. I have almost unlimited respect for law enforcement. The police have the most terrible jobs that I can imagine. They deal with the dregs of humanity for a living, and the pay sucks. I know a lot of members of the LE community, and they are overwhelmingly very good folks. I could not do their jobs. That’s automatic respect from me.

Ditto for first responders. Long hours, low pay, lots of dismal outcomes, odds for improvement of circumstances, low.

The military is more complex. I respect the service of those who've been in combat. That’s genuine heroism. But desk jockeys in the Pentagon—that’s more complicated. Military service is a large and mixed bag. Timothy McVeigh came from the military. So did Hunter Biden and Lee Harvey Oswald. All three are assholes, and I’m not thanking any of them for their service.

But there exists another type of hero whose work goes largely unnoticed. You are not likely to see them in a halftime show anytime soon. That their heroism goes unacknowledged is due to the fact that looking away from what they do is much easier than looking straight at what they do. The pain you feel from looking at is personal.

I’m talking about the people in everyone’s orbit who quietly go about doing the right thing as much as they can. Not, mind you, the people who sit in the front row of church and brag about it (most of whom, IMO, are hoping that one day of piety balances six days of assholery). Though faith does guide many of the genuinely good Samaratins, it does so quitely. These folks are just doing what they can to make the world a better place. And they do it not for themselves but for others.

I’m talking about married couples with children who put in the work to maintain a stable marriage for the sake of not themselves but their children. Marriage is hard; bailing out of one is easy. I respect everyone who’s done the work to create a stable and loving environment for their children who had no choice in who was going to bring them into the world.

I’m talking about those who value the truth, value their word, and who honor their commitments—even when it’s hard. Anyone can do the right thing when it’s easy and everyone is cheering. It’s much more difficult when it’s difficult and no one’s looking.

I’m talking about those who speak truth to power—especially alone. You think that it was easy being Thomas Paine? A founding father had six people show up at his funeral, and two of them were freed slaves.

I’m talking about those who care for others who can’t take care of themselves. I recently attended my 50th high school reunion. One of the things that I discovered were classmates who looked like they were destined to set the world on fire back in 1974, whose lives subsequently followed a different trajectory. While I escaped the troubles of the flat world in the mountains during my youth, they remained behind to take care of ailing parents, children with special needs, or spouses with emotional issues. Some of them did yeomans work with the most austere of resources.

Anyone can deal with challenges with enough support. It’s quite a different thing when one is divorced, existing from paycheck to paycheck, dealing with addiction, or anything else that involves sustained periods of quiet desperation. Suffering loss or being crushed emotionally—two things that often go hand in hand—are among the most difficult things in the world to overcome. Many of my old classmates dealt with these while taking care of others. They did it not for riches, fame, or even, in most cases, for salvation. They did it because it was necessary and it was the right thing to do. Nothing I’ve ever accomplished in my life made the world a better place like they did. Those people are my heroes. To call anyone like this a friend, as I have come to realize, is a prize above rubies.

Right now, that’s my journey. I’m trying as hard as I can to earn my place among them. It took a lot to get me here, and most of the journey, truth be told, wasn’t pleasant. But, as sayeth the bard, great works rarely come from places of comfort. If the bumps in the road were what were necessary to get me to where I am now, so be it. I’m just glad to get the chance to smooth the wrinkles out of my karma while I still can.

There were three things that happened in 2024 that got me tuned up right. The first happened one day while I was playing guitar on my favorite bench in my favorite park down in town. I have a steady, twice-a-month paying gig, but I have to play pop music there to keep a crowd. When I go play in the park, I play for me. That means jazz.

I don’t get to see my kids all of the time anymore. And when they are gone, it feels like someone removed part of me with a bad scalpel and no anesthetic. It hurts like a sonofabitch. And there’s not a fucking thing that I can do about it. One day I was down in the park playing while feeling pretty puny. The Pat Metheney song, Better Days Ahead, always cheers me up when I’m down—especially at the fast tempo that Pat favors live. Better Days Ahead is an instrumental, but anyone with an ear other than tin can clearly discern what it’s about. It’s uplifting and beautiful. It makes me happy every time I play it.

There’s a playground nearby, and on this particular day, there was a young mother there with a preschool-aged boy running around the swings and monkey bars. Mother and son played there for about a half hour before walking down the sidewalk past me toward their car in the parking lot. When they passed by, the mother reached into her pocket and pulled out $30, which she dropped into my guitar case. “You play beautifully,” she said, “and your song cheered me up. Thank you.” I was so stunned that all I could manage was to stammer a lame thank you. The car she drove off in led me to believe that $30 was a lot to her.

That woman didn't realize that she made not just my day, but my entire year. If I believed in angels, she’d be what I would expect one to be like. In a moment when I was near my nadir, an act of kindness by a complete stranger rocked my world. I will never forget that encounter. And as I think about it, a woman alone with a small child in a playground in the middle of the week maybe needed to hear Better Days Ahead herself. Maybe it gave her hope. Maybe we both helped each other.

That was the moment that the path ahead of me became crystal clear. It’s now time for me to pay the great wheel in the sky back my youthful respite in the mountains from the shit in the flat world.

A few weeks later, I had my first test along the new path. One of the ways that I connect with kids is by working with all of the organizations that have activities for them. I’ve coached youth sports for decades. I currently provide professional sound for my kids performance endeavors. On this particular afternoon, I had a short load in time for an outdoor show with a massive PA. My crew is good, but one hour from the trailer door opening to dress rehearsal is pushing it. It’s some excitement.

Both of my kids were with me that day and wanted to crew before performing. While I was patching the snake from the stage into the desk on the production riser out in front of the stage, my 8-year-old son approached me and said, “Dad, bad news, someone just hit the truck.” The truck is one of the few things I managed to keep in my divorce. It’s the truck of my dreams, a fully loaded one-ton dually that I use to pull around the other thing that I managed to hold onto, my 46’ fifth wheel. Yeah, I know, first-world problems. But I may yet end up living in that trailer, the 1.8% mortgage on the ranch being gone with the wind.

As I walked over to assess the damage, I wasn’t happy. When I got to the truck, I found a woman standing outside of a beater minivan full of kids crying. “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. She’d placed her ball hitch right into the middle of my front bumper. It was ugly.

I have to thank my lucky stars for guiding me in that moment. I considered anger. I thought a lot about self-control. I even though about why she had a 2-5/16 ball hitch on a minivan. But in the end, instead of getting pissed, I gave the woman a hug and told her not to worry about it. “I’ll take care of it myself. Just go on and have a better day.”

As she drove away, my son looked at me in a way that I’ve never seen before. Then he gave me a hug and told me how proud he was of me. One of the dance moms who’d seen the whole thing told me that her husband owned a parts store and that she’d make sure that I got a deal on whatever parts I needed. I realized in that moment that kindness is in such short supply that when it occurs, it sends waves of appreciation through the very fabric of this sad and desultory world.

The third thing that got me right was recently looking down at both of my young foster kids and realizing that it was completely up to me to convince them that the entire adult world isn’t full of dipshits. You cannot imagine, unless you’ve stood there yourself looking down at a couple of young faces forged in suffering, what this feels like. You can feel the weight of it. It’s a genuine ephiphany.

I used to imagine that I was free in the mountains, but I was merely absent. In each of these recent moments, for the first time in my life, I actually was free. That’s my new road. So I’m trying Ringo; I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd. He’s the real hero.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com