“Hi Jon, I am new to your blog, but I wanted to share with you that I have been reading your book “Saving Simon” nearing the end now. Just read the chapter where you decided to put Rocky down. I am inclined to ask why you could not have just kept them apart, the donkey`s and Rocky. Just seemed so unfair to me that you put down the animal that was being abused by another. It was after all Rocky`s home first! Disappointed, sorry! I think had it been me I would have figured out a plan. You wrote in detail that Rocky was thriving, gaining weight, dancing, full of spirit, seemed to be at peace and enjoying his life and the attention, but yet you still chose to let him go. I think my heart shattered into a million pieces. I am sorry to question you, I just love animals, as I sit here thinking about Rocky, my heart melts!“
Pam, message to me posted to Facebook Messenger, Friday, July 24.
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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.“
Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement speech, 2005.
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It’s interesting – and surprising to me, but every message like the one Pam Sanders sent to me this morning has become a gift to me, an affirmation, a way of affirming my life-long struggle for identity and clarity and moral purpose.
To me, it is not comprehensible to write a letter like that to a stranger, a person you don’t know, about an animal you have never seen, on a farm you do not understand.
For one thing, I would not think it my business, my grandmother would have spanked me for such rudeness and presumption.
For another, I would never presume to tell someone else how or why to make such a painful and complex decision, one Maria and I made together and have not doubted for a second. I would hope I would simply feel sympathy.
The moral space around each one of us is sacred and very pesonal, the one thing we fully own is our own decisions, our own sense of right and wrong. Every unwanted intrusion is a violation, a form of the new cultural abuse. The world beyond us is different from me, though. The once sacred idea of minding one’s own business and respecting the decisions of others has collapsed under the technological tsunami of digital media.
An impressive woman named Helena wrote me a message recently expressing unease with my essay on the life of Caitlyn Jenner. She said she was raised as an Evangelical Christian, in a small town with very religious parents she loved dearly. She could not approve what Jenner had done, changing his identity from a man to a woman. The Bible as she understands it forbids it, she said. But she wanted to tell me that she respected me so much for writing in admiration of Jenner’s life, that even though her faith could not accept it, she believed that Jenner and other trans gender people had the right to live as they wish and must, that God made all of us as individuals and love us all – her, Jenner, me. She wishes her peace and happiness.
My own feelings were as sacred as hers, or for that matter, Jenner’s.
Helena wanted me to know that she enjoyed my blog and would never turn away from it because I made a decision that was different from hers. She did not believe in the idea of disagreement, she said, we were all correct in our own hearts and souls. That was what God intended. Right and wrong was the conceit of arrogant and self-righteous people, she said. Bless her, I say.
I loved the spirit of Helena’s message, unlike the self-serving one of Pam Sanders. Here was a woman struggling to accept something that was unacceptable in her faith, and yet cherishing the sanctity of the individual, and the sanctity of individual choice. What religion was supposed to be about. Just as Sanders’ message made my heart sink a bit, Helena’s lifted it up.
My wish for Pam is for her to make her own decisions, and live her own life as fully and meaningfully as possible. I do not seek her approval or her opinion, not does it matter much to me. Her letter is not about me, of course, or the pony. It is about herself, and what she would do. I did answer her and express concern for her melted heart. She seemed to hang on long enough to write me that message. I told her I had open heart surgery just a year ago, she needs to take care of her heart, it is expensive to fix them.
Don’t be sorry to question me, Pam, I am not God, I never believe I am always right. I am not in need of your sympathy, I am happy with most of my choices. My wish for you is the strength to look at yourself, and your theft of another person’s pain and story for your own emotional needs and interests. Do not exploit the hard life of poor blind Rocky, who was so far from thriving on the morning of his death. But how could you know this? You are just one more person wrapping yourself in the banner of loving animals while knowing nothing about them. Instead, you reveal your disconnection from people. You were not here after all, on that very cold winter morning, the vet begging us to spare old and trembling Rock another winter.
I am grateful it was not within your power to prolong his suffering, especially in the name of loving him.
I don’t think I have ever met a human being who doesn’t say they love animals, yet I have met so few human beings who seem to love people. How can this be?
My own philosophy about messages like this is simple. I do not argue my decisions or beliefs, surely not on Facebook, certainly not with strangers who insist they love animals but do not. Argument does no good, it does not change hearts or minds, it can become a toxic way of life and of looking at the world. It corrodes the soul of the arguers.
I sometimes share these messages – I get them every day – not to be harsh, but to remind others that identity and sense of self are precious, both can be destroyed in one blow or by a thousand cuts. You need not defend yourself, but you do need to protect yourself. I take every message like Pam’s as a magic pill to make me strong. I think that has worked for me, beyond my expectations.
The world is filled with hollow men and women who claim to practice moral conduct. They have not created a moral world.
Moral conduct, wrote the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, depends upon the intercourse with man or women and themselves. We must not place ourselves in a position in which we would have to despise ourselves. Morally speaking, this should be enough not only to enable us to tell right from wrong but also to do right and avoid wrong.
It certainly, she wrote, is not a matter of concern with the other but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity and even human pride. “The standard is neither the love of some neighbor nor self-love, [or a stranger on Facebook] but self-respect,” she wrote.
Both Pam’s message and Steve Job’s eloquent and instantly famous speech to those Stanford graduates spoke to one of the most significant ideas in life, at least to me: the quality of being a person as distinguished from being merely human.
It is simple, wrote Socrates, it has nothing to do with gifts or intelligence, the person possesses the almost automatic gift of thoughtfulness, the human simply exists.
Or put another way, in granting pardon or judgement or understanding, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no actual person left one could ever pardon or forgive.
Pam, when you sit in judgement of the moral conduct of another person in such a thoughtless and unknowing way, you are not simply disagreeing with a decision, you are chipping away at what it means to be a person, a being free in this world to make our own moral decisions about how to live, the key to identity. This is, to me, as it was to Henry David Thoreau, a sacred right. I hope you stay on the blog, but if you do, please do not ever try to tell me what I should have done again. If you don’t care for me or my decisions, then all you need do is go away.
On all of the earth, this search for individual morality and choice is something unique to humans, no other living things have been grated this gift. I will not ever give it away out of convention or the conventional wisdom of the times. Or turn it over to strangers.
Helena understood it, so I think, did Jesus Christ. This is one of the most important issues of our time, raised countless times a day by miraculous and disturbing technologies that permit us to enter the private space of other human beings without thought or mandate, and seek to make them small and drown out their individualityl. I hope to always have the courage to follow my own heart and intuition, to stay big, and to never let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out my own inner voice.