Comment by Sam

ME:

I can’t get over the fact that Sam said he was just plain scared.

Inspired by Sam, I am going to make a statement that will destroy any shred of respect any remaining Tough Guys out there ever had for me. If you read “Mensa Working People” you will get the impression that I had all the “educators” figured out and that, when I entered the university of age sixteen, I went in with a courageous laugh.

Young Bob was scared witless and something that rhythms with it. The doofuses professors had sent staggering out into the public school teachership had been flunking me and I was about the face the professors THEMSELVES.

All this is easy for me to say at 65, but when I was 16 I was fifty percent sure I was the doofus, not them. They were out there in the “real world,” and I had no acquaintanceship at all with it. Before every single test my stomach was in a knot. I could see myself sitting there facing questions that were an absolute blank to me, while all the regular high school graduates around me, people who had qualified the regular way, went right ahead and dealt with them. This lasted for YEARS.

Now to what I think is Sam’s real fear.

Remember that everything I say here should INTERCONNECT. In My last article on “Fear,” I made a statement few but Sam could identify with. I said that it wasn’t just that Teddy Roosevelt inherited enough money so that he would never have to work, but that his father and his family did not EXPECT him to work.

Anyone but Sam and I would tend to say, “Well, hell, if he had the money, why should he care what anybody thought?”

Joe Kennedy, father of John and Teddy Kennedy, gave each of his children one million dollars tax-free cash when they reached their twenty-first birthday. This was in the THIRTIES AND FOURTIES, and you know how much a million was then. Papa Joe said he did that so that “My children can tell me to go to hell if they want to.”

Actually every one of Joseph Kennedy’s kids lived in terror of him all their lives. He EXPECTED everything from them. He wanted his oldest son to be president and when s oldest son got killed in World War II, the burden fell on John. John Kennedy joked about that when reporters kidded him during the 1960 campaign about his father buying the election for him.

He said, “I told my father I just needed enough votes to win. I don’t want him to pay for a landslide.”

People who can make jokes like that have been through hell. A good sense of humor usually comes from a lot of pain.

Sam is terrified that his parents are going to think he’s a dunce. And I can’t assure him that they WON’T.

Do you have any idea of the kind of guts it takes for a man of eighteen to admit that he is afraid of parental disapproval? We live in a world where we are taught that eighteen-year-olds were out saving the world in fearless combat (in Nam, now that the WWII crowd is dying out). And here is Sam admitting that he is a guy living at home who is afraid of what his parents will think.

All the Tough Guys will look down on Sam. You are more than welcome to look down on me, too. But this is harder on Sam because I am old and I have really found out what morons they are. Lord, I HATE Tough Guys, and I think you can see why. I will take Sam over a million of them.

Saint John Kennedy, combat veteran and president, was terrified of his father until the day he died. Teddy Roosevelt had a priceless advantage John Kennedy would have given ANYTHING for. All this INTERCONNECTS with Sam. And Sam had the guts to bring it out.