The Spirit and the Letter
Part One: The Beginning of the End
In 1986, I joined the Air Force JROTC squadron at Lebanon High School. For those unfamiliar with the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the U.S. military has established a program through which to educate young men and women in most of the non-combat subjects of service in the armed forces. ROTC participants learn about American military history and structure as well as branch-specific topics such as—in the case of the Air Force—general avionics. Initially, this program operated only at the post-secondary level, in colleges around the country; but some time in the latter half of the 20th century (I should probably remember this more precisely), the Reserve Officer Training Corps was extended with a Junior version for secondary schools.
I joined the AFJROTC in part to follow in my mother’s footsteps. She was enlisted in the Air Force and worked as an air traffic controller, and it was at a military hospital that she gave birth to me. My youth was colored by the generalized ideal of honor, duty, and discipline of the military. I adored the image of the military as a distinguished organization wherein, through thoughtful, principled action alone, a man could find success. There was—and is—an air of elitism about our armed services, and I wanted to breathe it in.
I applied myself to the military rules and codes more with each successive year, proudly wearing my uniform every Thursday as required and, eventually, during other days electively. The uniform is the touchstone of the military ideal, and I made it a point to earn as many symbols of achievement within that ideal as I could. By the time I graduated high school, my left breast sagged under the weight of all sort of ribbon and medal, including awards of local (squadron) and national recognition.
By the time I graduated high school, I’d also come to realize just how little life in the armed services approached my cherished fantasy. While rank and decoration carry weight, and everyone wears uniforms, the everyday operation of the military is less a matter of honor and discipline than it is the business of getting a job done. Most, if not all, folks who join the military don’t do so because they aspire to sit at some modern day Round Table. They join for the G.I. Bill, or a steady wage, or a chance to travel, or the brutish (but necessary) will to fight. They join, in short, not to navigate the codes and regulations to find an ideal but to navigate the codes and regulations to find more worldly satisfaction.
There is, of course, nothing wrong in this. As it turns out, we probably don’t want to employ the collective engine of warfare to find our honor and integrity. In the human condition, it appears that war is necessary, and some might as well find the means of livelihood through its machinations. But, whatever the spirit of a military code, the simple application of its letter brings the airman no closer to honor than does the incentive of commission the salesman.
This was the first time I can remember conscientiously finding the discrepancy between an abstraction and the system of rules built ostensibly to approach it. We step through these sorts of discrepancies every single day, though. The legal system is an infamously incomplete embodiment of the fairness and justice it is purported to serve. Religion, as a system of belief, can’t hope to but claw at whatever appreciation of divinity at which it directs its efforts. For all its apparent successes, the field of physics is simply an approximation of the mystery of nature it hopes to unravel. And, for all its richness, human language can often leave an idea only crudely articulated. It seems a fair, if glib, pronouncement that Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem approximates the chasm between an ideal and whatever mechanism we might find to grasp at it.
So what? It’s not so bad, really. This basically says that we and every other creature we know of are incomplete, that we can’t realize all that we might conceive. Mostly this doesn’t bother me, as this gives us something to do between birth and death. However, as ready as I am to grudgingly accept this condition generally, it tends still to leave a bad taste in my mouth. What worth are any of these sets of rules, any of these structures of system and logic, if we simply accept them as if they themselves constituted their referent?
What, for instance, makes a man a father? At first blush, I’m sure most people would assume that a man is a father if he provides genetic material to conceive a child. This simple rule serves to establish a foothold in our social structure for both child and parent, invoking a relationship based at least on the dependence of the child on the parent for wellness and growth. Fathers, as parents, are charged with providing the staples of physical survival as well as the environment and opportunities for a child to develop mentally and psychologically (and, if you prefer, spiritually).
Yet the rule as such is incomplete. Take the case of a man who shoulders the burden voluntarily, rather than as a result of making a baby. This man can fully enjoy the burden and fruits of fatherhood only if at least one of two conditions is met: he is married to the child’s mother; or he legally adopts the child. These extend the rule of biological paternity well enough, I suppose, but there are still gaps between their real and presumed intended effects. The man who marries a woman and carries fatherhood of her children is at the mercy of his matrimony. If ever there comes a day when the matrimonial relationship doesn’t work anymore, he may find himself stripped of some or all of his fatherhood, notwithstanding however many years he spent taking care of and loving that child.
This is an understandable eventuality of the rules of paternity, and it’s hard to imagine how differently they might have come about. That doesn’t change the fact that no matter that I have cared for and loved my four children over the last eight years, I have to face the possibility that I won’t keep my right to provide that in the future for all of them since only the youngest is mine in the genetic sense. There are few things I can think of that scare me more than that. Sure, whatever happens, I’ll most likely be able to give something to them throughout their childhood; and once they reach adulthood these legal issues fall away. But that’s a lot of years to miss out on homework and first dates and scraped knees and triumphs and failures and all the things that make us in our youth. The letter, in this case, betrays the spirit.
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