Lorelei Shrugged

I had the opportunity to practice my grandfatherly skills during a trip to visit my granddaughter. 

 We do not share many physical resemblances but as you can see we both have the same take on the world.  I spent time with her and then returned home while Barb went down for a longer visit and I spent some time visiting our parents (3 of them) who live in a retirement home/nursing facility.  That physical and emotional location – involved with babies and the elderly on a personal basis -  leads me to my criticism of what is rapidly becoming an intellectual and political activity in these United States: appreciating the thought of Ayn Rand. 

While watching the obligatory talks from Wayne Dyer during a local PBS fundraising event I heard him say something like:  “It is important to speak on behalf of the people not in the room.”  I believe that to be correct.  I believe that to be correct and a moral duty when the others in the room are speaking of those absent in derogatory and mean spirited ways.  There are no Objectivists in the room with me – but I do not have to go far to find them.  They show up whenever I watch and listen to political commentary.

What does not show up, or to be more precise, who does not show up, in the novels of Ayn Rand are babies and old people.  In his remarkable review of Atlas Shrugged, Whittaker Chambers notes:  Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained.  Children and old people are not able to strive and succeed and dominate and fashion their own lives.  Maybe in their future and maybe in their past – but now they need assistance.  Someone has to put the welfare of those two classes of people above their own and care for them.  We call that self-sacrifice.

One of the remarkable things I have noted is how many folks who call themselves Christian espouse the philosophy of Ayn Rand at the same time.  I have not been able to discern how that works – what about the constant reference to the widows and orphans and sojourners within your gate (that would be the old, the needy young, and the immigrants) as being those who God wants us to protect.

It is true that big “gummint” may not be the way to care for them, but it seems to me that the question is not should we care for those folks, but rather how.  There is an interesting essay in one of the Christian Century blogs that invites that conversation rather than the one we are now having. 

Who is in your room, or your heart and mind, when you consider how to live your life?

What makes you shrug as if to dump things off?  What makes bend over and pick things up to help carry them?  Or is it who or whom instead of what?