The Victims of Success

I WAS 17 AND a reporter for a small daily newspaper in rural Upstate New York when I met Robin Starling. He was only 13 but the most critical event of his entire life had already occurred. The event had taken place when he was 10. He had been sitting stop one of the powerful diesel engine tractors on his father's prosperous Lewis County dairy farm. The tractor lurched forward unexpectedly. The 80-pound boy fell off his makeshift seat and into the tangle of steel blades. It was a wonder he wasn't decapitated was the comment from the doctors who saved his life. As it was, he lost both legs and one arm.

Two and-a-half years later, I was dispatched to the Starling family farm to interview Robin, who had been winning blue ribbons for his calf, Dickv, at county fair cattle shows throughout northern New York. As I followed Robin through his farm chores--gingerly side-stepping cow manure--I noticed that he got around surprisingly well on his mechanical limbs. I had unnecessarily steeled myself for his physical awkwardness. The awkwardness I found instead was the shyness typical of any boy going through puberty.

It was one of those days when I hated the newspaper business. The boy's family had consented to the interview, perhaps seeing it as a way of demonstrating to Robin that he could lead an almost normal life. But more likely they saw it as a way of proving the same thing to themselves, and vindicating themselves from guilt over what was an avoidable accident. But we at the newspaper had initiated the story: we weren't content to list him among the other blue ribbon winners at the Jefferson County Fair, which would have been the normal treatment of the boy. All I could say to myself and to my editor was, why highlight the tragedy again? His rejoinder: Just think, he might have become a burden on society. At the time, the experience was too painful for me to think about, so I resorted to a formula and wrote the cheery, overcoming adversity story. After all, no one wants to read about tragedy in the Farm and Garden section.

WHAT DID I SAY in my article? I did my job and I lied. I told my readers that Robin Starling is now leading a normal life. He's not only surviving, he's succeeding: he's winning blue ribbons. And he doesn't hold any grudges. Technology nearly killed him but look how it's making a nearly normal life for him now. I lied because the truth was not simply that technology was making a more normal life for him, but, more importantly, that it was making for him an existence with which other people could be comfortable.

Maybe some of my readers were not fooled by the success-story format of my article. But most probably were. We don't like to see things like legless little boys--they contradict our expectations and desires about the world. So we become willing accomplices in a scheme to cover up the truth. We have great psychological use for someone like Robin Starling who can appear to be normal and who therefore affirms what we would like to believe. We can successfully go on fooling ourselves like this because Robin Starling has a great stake in-making sure that we continue to see him as a success story. For if we view him as a failure, he may be shut up in a nursing home, out of our sight.

Robin Starling is living in a contradiction. As the disabled victim of technology he is society's greatest shame. But as the person who overcomes his handicap with the help of technology, he is society's pride. On one hand, he has the right to be among society's most bitter critics. But on the other, he must be among its most cheerful proponents, to be sure that he--the painful reminder of society's failing--is not locked away.

In writing about Robin, I was also caught in a contradiction. I was the guilty partner-in-crime with all of those people who didn't want to know the truth, who were satisfied with my half-honest news story. But I was also the unreproachable Good Samaritan to Robin Starling, who had to convince these same people that he was a success and not to be abandoned.

Robin Starling was an important part of my education. I learned from him something about success in this society. I learned that what it really amounts to is acceptance, to not having people desert you.

SUCCESS BY ANY definition is something that we want. When we want something very badly we tend to redefine that goal as "good"; we no longer see what's wrong with it. When our goal is popularity with or power over other people we tend to conform to other people's notions of what a good companion or reasonable leader is. We try to fit ourselves into a pattern specified by someone else. We become the perfectly attentive lover or the perfectly dutiful student or the perfectly reliable worker.

For Robin Starling, success meant becoming the perfectly adjusted boy. His fear of being abandoned was very tangible, not the intellectual crisis it is for the rest of us. His relative success was achieved by repressing the alienation he must have felt, forgetting about the contradiction in which he was caught--dependent on the very society which nearly killed him--and proceeding as if it didn't exist. He was, in a sense, fooling himself and, of course, fooling everyone else. But all of us--the readers, the newspaper which published his story, and myself, the person who wrote the story--were willing collaborators in the scheme to shove Robin Starling into an acceptable mold. We were all fooling ourselves.

Our only defense was that we were and we are victims of alienation, that feeling of emotional distance from a world in which we must constantly face something ugly in everything positive, something disappointing in everything successful. A typical reaction to alienating situations is to somehow redefine the situation as not contradictory. The simplest way to do that is to eliminate the upsetting scenes from one's life. We learn to look at life single-mindedly and edit out the bad footage in our vision and perceptions. We learn not to see certain contradictions. For instance, we learn not to see, not to notice the stilted "legs" and mechanical arm of Robin Starling standing next to his prize-winning cow with its perfect loins. We learn to see only the blue ribbon on the animal--the badge of success--and the smile on the boy's face--the sign of acquiescence.

We learn not to see what is disturbing and see only what is comfortable. We learn not to see the laboratory where napalm was invented and see only the world "Veritas" chiseled into the stone wall. We learn not to see the young men drafted into fighting a war for American business, and see only a struggle for democratic ideals. We learn not to see the old and unemployed--those who become isolated from mainstream society by being denied participation in the economy--and see only the opportunities which exist for the rest of us.

The danger in acquiescing to the success-story model of the world and in being apathetic towards those who are expendable in this design is in not seeing the true nature of the world. And if we can be fooled about the world, we can be fooled about ourselves. If we can be talked into pursuing goals that have nothing to do with our ideals, them we can be talked into thinking that falling into the mold leaves us, like Robin, somehow less abandoned.

AFEW YEARS AGO, during the Vietnam War, students at Harvard and elsewhere refused to be apathetic in the face of contradiction. The contradiction that faced them was a more dramatic duplicate of the one that faces students today: an economy in which many are expendable.

The contradiction was easier to see eight years ago when it was a matter of life and death for young people facing the draft. Students were clearly on the losing side of the contradiction then. But we're fooling ourselves if we think we're not now. Today it is a matter of making it or not making it in an economy which only has room for some. Many will not make it, many will be made obsolete and unemployed as a result of age or sex or skin color. Some will make it, but probably at the expense of their ideas. But this is difficult to see, especially when all of our energy is directed towards not seeing, towards making our perceptions fit someone else's vision.

The issue is really the same, but we are fooling ourselves into thinking that it has changed, that there is a New Mood on Campus and new conditions which justify it. We are willing to be fooled because the whole truth of it is painful to see--just as it is painful to see Robin Starling's plastic arm and legs.

It is very human to want to repress the ugly and the painful. But it is also very dangerous. Repression is psychological anesthesia, and like real anesthesia it becomes dangerous when the drugged patient exerts himself--feeling no pain, seeing no evidence of death, he is unaware of and unprepared for the danger from within. By not admitting that pain exists, we never find a cure, just as by not admitting that a war has been declared we never create peace, and by not admitting that imperfection exists we never reach utopia.