Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming

7. Face Off

163 Charles looked at his watch impatiently, took another sip from his water glass, and grimaced. He adjusted his tie, which didn’t need adjusting, ran his fingers though the sparse gray hair above his right ear, and then noticed, with sharp irritation, how nervous he was. What was there to be nervous about, he wondered. It’s just a man having dinner with his son in a nice restaurant. Why Benjamin always had to be late, he didn’t understand. But then, he was young, immature, and hopefully would soon grow out of this ridiculous nonsense about changing the world in about a hundred years with The Party. Where had he gotten these crazy ideas? As if Charles didn’t know. That Jewish Marxist philosophy professor in college, who’d filled Benjamin’s head with crazy ideas about the evils of globalization, and corporate influence, and how things happened “in the long run, slowly, surely, powerfully.” As if that professor had anything more successful to offer than hardworking, risk-taking entrepreneurs and technological innovation. 7 Face Off 164 * Engaging Voices And anyway, good things happened because everybody went about their own business, “slowly, surely, powerfully.” Buying, selling, producing, consuming. Not letting the government make a lot of laws and interfere. That’s the system they had, and they weren’t going to get a better one because some snot-nosed kid like Benjamin told them what to do—blaming America first, riling up the poor people and the minorities. When the blacks wanted to get ahead, they did fine, like those two colored lawyers he’d known at Benron. They’d dressed right, talked right, and made out pretty damn well for themselves. Before it all went bust. Let blacks act like that, work hard, fit in, and there’d be no more racism. That’s what the country, the world, needed—not Benjamin’s pie-in-thesky political groups. But he hadn’t seen his son since getting out of prison, and while he had sworn to forget his time there on the day he left Smithfield, it kept nagging at the back of his mind. All the pride in himself he’d generated over years of hard work, fitting in, rising up in the corporate chain—all that was stained now, marked forever by the stupid, crazy, just plain wrong things he had done. Lying to shareholders , hiding things from colleagues, avoiding the press until the last minute. Why? He wanted to be able to look at his son with confidence, give him advice, help straighten him out. Pretty hard to do that as an ex-con, he thought bitterly, just a hint of self-loathing cracking through his neatly arranged facade of expensive gray suit, light blue tie, and finely tailored shirt. Nonsense, he thought again, using a word he was very fond of. Anybody could make a mistake. And that’s what he’d done. But he’d taken responsibility, paid his debt to society, and now he was back. There had already been some nibbles from a few venture capital firms with interests in high-tech energy start-ups. A man with his experience wouldn’t go hungry, that was for sure. If he made one bad blunder in a lifetime of hard work and success, that didn’t mean there was anything wrong with the system. He’d play by the rules this time, not even a hair out of place from start to finish, and everything would work out just fine. Even with that Face Off * 165 pathetic windbag Obama as president, this was still the greatest country on earth. Benjamin had waited at the bus stop thirty-five minutes, patiently going over his notes from the last meeting of the new organization he was cultivating—an interfaith group trying to raise salaries for immigrant Haitian women working in nursing homes. Not a bad group of cadre, he thought. Of course a lot of them were just working off some middle-class guilt around the poor black folk, or maybe had seen overworked, criminally underpaid immigrants taking care of their own grandparents. Religious types worked hard, didn’t fuss much, and did what they said they’d do. But they rarely saw the big picture, the long haul. They were too busy trying to do the right thing today. Still, there were a few he might be able to bring...