The Billionaires Are Not Coming to Save Us

Every year, without fail, I listen to the Blackstone Audio Recorded Books version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, read by the late Frank Muller. There are other recordings and movie versions (I’m personally torn between the 1984 made-for-television version with George C. Scott and the 1951 Alistair Sim “Scrooge”). Several years ago, Micki and I and Evan participated in an acted narration of the story for our downtown Christmas event over several Yuletides. The first year, to my lasting joy, I got to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in which I bundled a bunch of black sheets over myself to the point of being unable to move or see and—with the expert advice of a genius friend—kept my left hand free to gesture, since that would be, by definition, more sinister. A Christmas Carol is the only Dickens that I love as much as I do and without overstating it (I hope) is the one that is annually the most relevant and poignant for the modern era, almost as if Dickens understood what the future would hold.

What follows, then, is a strange amalgam of literary review, social commentary, philosophical introspection, and societal criticism, using Dickens’ holiday masterpiece as the center structure. This will be the last essay I write for the year and so, I decided to make a Frankenstein’s monster, lumping together a series of topics and sources to make one long and (hopefully) thought-provoking read before family arrives and it is time to eat too many cookies and open presents. Echoing Dickens, then, for however you “keep” Christmas, I hope it is a wonderful season for you. See you in January.

As he stands in his dressing gown on the fateful night of his eventual redemption, Ebenezer Scrooge is shown an image from his past. A sad woman tells a much younger Ebenezer, “Another idol has displaced me. A golden one.” The younger man rebels against this idea, but the elder knows it is true. He has not yet changed his heart, but seeing this stark memory, it is clear he is stirred, as he tells the spirit to show him no more.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is the most relatable of the three spirits sent by Jacob Marley's specter for Scrooge's ‘reclamation’. Just the first spirit might be enough for us to internalize the transformation of the miser, at least for the moment or the season to participate in the greater lesson of the story.

That lesson is particularly apt for modern readers. Scrooge becomes his miserly old self in the first place because, in his heart of hearts, he allowed gain—the greed for wealth and worldly security—to fill the deep wells of emptiness excavated in his spirit as a young child. Left alone at school because his father foolishly blamed Ebenezer for his mother’s death in childbirth, the young man turned from that pain to the only security he understood: money. People may die or abandon us, but money, once attained and scrupulously squirreled away, provides the illusion of endless safety. 

Dickens' holiday masterpiece is a wonderful cornucopia of human experience and has an emotional pitch rarely attained by modern literature. What could be more cathartic than to read, watch, listen, or participate in the myriad renderings of his immortal ghostly classic each Christmas? The fable helps to open me up to the deeper meanings of charity and generosity of the season by getting me to ask myself the same timeless question over again every year: what really matters?

There may have been other years and other eras when Scrooge's nocturnal spiritual journey seemed as relevant. This year, I can think of only one other fable that fits as neatly as a direct warning about the rising tide of human indifference, disdain, tribalism, hatred, self-absorption, corruption and greed. That other story is Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, Dante is led on a nighttime adventure not through time, but down through the nine levels of Hell, toward the infernal city of Dis by the ghost of the antique Roman, Virgil.  

Past the horrid gates of Hell, we are shown Dante’s greedy and corrupt Italian contemporaries getting their just deserts in the many levels of eternal torture. Dickens might have found contemporaries to burn in effigy in the London of his time in emulation of Dante, but the comedy of Inferno is that there is a final judgment for the worst of humanity beyond life—an end of power and security. Dante revels in that end by pointing out that even the worst humans eventually die. For A Christmas Carol to be a hopeful and uplifting tale, Scrooge's transformation arc must therefore be more pragmatic on this side of the casket lid. And Dickens manages a sharp-witted and human story that shows us that as long as we are alive, there is hope that we can be better people.

The brilliance of A Christmas Carol is that it allows us to travel the gamut of human emotions and flaws, but also the many feelings of pity, regret, hurt and broken hearts, fear and empathy and eventually seeing ourselves in other people. We plunge with Scrooge from the precipice of miserly greed and callous disregard for his fellows through to the awareness of mortality and of other people and the poignancy and pain of their lives. The heartfelt existential sobs of a man changing his stars for the better echo in us, too.

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There is one change that Dickens does not allow us to see. We know that, as the final stave closes, Scrooge startles his employee, Bob Cratchit by offering to pay him way more money and buys him the biggest turkey in London. We are told that he becomes a great man, but we do not see if, in his final rise toward greatness, Scrooge dumps all his cash for a life of quiet piety and poverty in service to others, or if he husbands his millions for the good of his fellows. Given the chance to be logical about fiction, the latter seems to be more likely.

From the modern viewpoint, Scrooge getting to keep and use his cold hard cash for good is realistic even if it is the most dangerous outcome for him. The opportunity to relapse into his miserly habits without constant intercession is a strong temptation. It presupposes a change of heart that is permanent and not subject to other emotional upheavals. What if, for instance, despite his financial support and friendship, Tiny Tim still doesn't survive? Such a tragedy might cast Ebeneezer back into his old mental haunts of bitterness, resentment and misery.

Likewise, as the year rolls away from Christmas, Scrooge might find that his work awakens the old fella’s grasping and greedy habits anew. He may pay Bob Cratchit more money and help his family and friends, but in his heart, what if the ghosts’ lessons grow dim beside the light of gain? We are never shown if Ebenezer makes the daily decision to reaffirm his Christmas lessons.

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Dickens often wrote about the disparity of wealth. A few held most of the power and money while the majority lived in horrible poverty. The world today isn’t much different, but rather than feeling this “Dickensian Divide” keenly, modernity adores the idea of wealth. We have elevated material gain far above the virtues that Scrooge learns on Christmas Eve. Our golden idolatry presupposes that with monetary worth comes a natural disposition to, as Scrooge might have done after the close of the book, strew cash like rose petals across the desolate streets of London and the world. To us, the term ‘billionaire’ is synonymous with beneficence and fiduciary responsibility. 

The irony of this naivety is that we regularly witness billionaires (the modern inheritors of the Scrooge we first meet in Stave One) going to great lengths to protect their billions. They do work hard to promote their hopeful worldview but it seldom has the motivation behind it underlined in Scrooge's transformation. And even Scrooge admits to having paid his taxes. Getting to the level of massive wealth requires a hard and grasping hand, not a soft and generous heart. That fact doesn't stop people from idolizing wealthy individuals.

Everyone's favorite richest man, the charmless Bond Villain, Elon Musk, seemed at first to be positioning himself as a great modern innovator and entrepreneur in emulation of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Unlike those men who, in part, raised the cash to provide the financial infrastructure upon which the industrial age was built, Musk only works from a place of ego. Here is a man who really could solve world hunger or fund lobbying to initiate universal basic income. Instead, he bought a social media platform as a vanity project and used it to gain a position of power in the worst administration of all time.

His fans still worship him and think of him as a technological savior. Even the more reasonable people who have ever so slowly understood the error in their adoration of Musk only started to doubt him after he got the nod from the president-elect. Until that point, despite his worrisome words and actions, they continued to make excuses for his worsening behavior. Some still idolize him, almost as if they are getting paid to endorse him, or hoping they will get paid for their support.

His electric cars (a business that someone else started and he bought and gets credit for inventing) and his rockets make him seem like a scientific innovator. Despite his futuristic ideas and apparent innovations, Musk hasn't delivered on what matters. But he could have.

Americans seem to be almost pathologically incapable of seeing in men like Musk the Scrooge that lies just beneath the surface. Musk and other billionaires have indeed doubled down on creating the illusion that they are dashing toward the future, paving golden streets filled with futuristic advances. In truth, they have worked to consolidate power in both halves of American politics, endorsed the worst theocratic fascist ideologies, and corrupted the Supreme Court. Trying to point that out to the people who raise Musk and other billionaires to a godlike status is an act of futility.

Scrooge's final transformation comes as a result of putting his idea of monetary worth aside, finding worth in humanity and learning his responsibility for others. Without his fundamental pivot, Scrooge never gets to be redeemed. Rather, he becomes just like every other greedy person, an empty husk, trying to fill the internal void with shares and bank notes and bonds and spare change.

The virtues come from the person, not the cash. And we know all too well that cash too easily corrupts the person. Musk is evidence of that fact.

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A friend wrote to me recently and asked if I thought that younger generations who gained substantial wealth would use their capital to tackle the great social problems of our era. It was hard not to see this as a tacit admission that Musk and other billionaires had let us all down. His hope was, perhaps being more open-minded, young wealthy people would cast about to see if they could deal with gun violence or homelessness or climate change with their cash. It was a question worth considering. 

I lament the popular idea that one's generation, like a zodiac sign or horoscope, presupposes a certain worldview, as if all Millennials are easygoing and empathic or all Generation Z's are hyper-focused on social justice and equity. We may blame generational tendencies for the failures (or differences) in the way people handle certain social issues or for how they tend to behave generally, but this is an easy way of passing off our desire to scapegoat certain age groups or to undermine faith in others. 

Generational tendencies are as much a fairytale as Dickens's story. People are shaped by their upbringing and, to a point, the era they are born into. Their life experiences and their relative access to resources and opportunities have far more to do with how they will behave as adults. There is no evidence to suggest that a young person with exorbitant amounts of capital to hand would be any more or less likely to fall into greed and lust for power than any other ultra-wealthy person of any other age group. Scrooge happens to be old, but we could just as easily have a twenty-something Scrooge. It is certain that Scrooge's descent into greed began early and only got worse as he aged.

As I read my friend's question, I felt a strange but powerful hopelessness. If it is true that young wealthy people cannot be depended on to solve social ills, my answer could not be a cheerful one. Money has become a source of moral rot in the world. The wealthy, regardless of their generation, have no real sense of their surroundings. The problems of homelessness, climate change and gun violence are not problems to be solved, but, if possible, exploited for more money. This doesn't eliminate the possibility that there are those with a lot of money working hard to deal with our most pressing issues, I am sure, but they have an uphill battle against others of their kind. 

Scrooge, while doing his part with the people he knew and could help practically, could only contribute towards the larger problems of his world. He did not, either by dint of his newfound piety or his formerly hoarded wealth, close down the poor houses, the treadmills, or the debtor’s prisons.  One of the underlying implications of the story is that Christmas is one of the few times of year that people of means even consider those massive and cumbersome problems of poverty. It is only by working together that those problems can be solved.

In the most poignant moments of the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls back the lower swaths of his robes to show Scrooge two destitute children; a boy and a girl. The spirit tells Scrooge that the boy is Ignorance and the girl is Want.

 "Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased". 

Even in the most hopeful story ever written about Christmas, Dickens found it hard to hide his cynicism. The disparity between those who need the most help and those who could do the most good was an abyss that money alone could not fill or bridge. That gulf has only gotten wider in the intervening Christmases.

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Looking at the situation from above, the existence of the ultra-wealthy isn't enough to solve the big problems regardless of how old they are or how open-minded they seem. Today, we are faced with this same ethical dilemma. There are more billionaires and yet, the problems faced by society are more real, more present and more pressing than ever before. One can accurately assume that those problems are worse either despite billionaires or because of them. I know where I fall on that particular question. 

If Dickens' story teaches us anything it isn't that Scrooge's wealth is the best-case scenario for making a change. Rather, it teaches us that a change of heart can and will be the best chance for good to grow. We can certainly hope that the younger people with money will decide to work to solve problems, but that hope seems misplaced. Instead, I would echo the renewed Scrooge in my hope that each of us would decide to live in the past, present and future at all times and keep the meaning of Christmas (peace, goodwill, charity) in our hearts all year. This would indeed be a tall order for most of us, let alone those with far more money than they could ever spend in their lives.

If something is going to change, it has to be within each of us, at the individual level. No one person with money is going to rescue us. That door has been left open, and no billionaire has come through. Rather like the sign above the lintel at the gates Dante passes through, there is no hope that way. 

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That is the point of A Christmas Carol and of Scrooge's redemption. As we see Scrooge cross into a realm of goodness and virtue, we also live through his ghostly experiences, so that we, too, can join in his recovery and reclamation. The wealthy also have to face their mortality. Yet, we can only live our own lives, face our imminent death and decide for ourselves.

In the end, it doesn't matter if Scrooge gets to keep his money or if he gives it all away. What matters is that Scrooge realizes that he has a responsibility for other people. That is all that ever matters. The ghost of Jacob Marley tells his former business partner, that fateful Christmas Eve, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

The answer to my friend's question may be harsh, but it is no less true for all that. The wealthy have no real concern for us. They aren't coming to rescue us. Their outward appearance of technological or scientific adherence is a guise that allows them to hide their true intentions. It matters little how old they are or how they got their money. The only people we can depend on is ourselves. And as Scrooge finally learns, cementing his transformation, we have little time before the grave closes over us to do our part for those we can help.

28 Years

Earlier this week came an anniversary date that I long ago learned to brace myself for. On December 9th, 1996, my mother passed away from complications after a long battle with leukemia. She was 57.

Diagnosed seven years earlier, she had undergone various forms of treatment during the interim. Initially, though, she and my stepfather had been conned into believing that her health issues were a result of the mercury amalgam fillings in her teeth. They spent inordinate sums of money and lost essential treatment time funding this snake oil seller's scam. Her illness was probably a “secondary malignancy” caused by high-level radioiodine treatments for a thyroid condition she developed before I was born. 

By the time she understood this and began getting traditional medical treatment—moving to Texas to be within miles of the colossal M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston—her body had suffered badly from the ravages of her disease and she was desperate for anything that would help.

While she was away, I was left to my own devices in our ancient country house and became somewhat feral. I always had a rebellious nature, but without parents in the home, I was my own master. Mental independence evidently runs deep in the Bare DNA. When they were home, we had many clashes over homework, grades, chores and getting up for church. I was an insufferable freethinker and I refused to conform to her rules. I was a smelly teenager with a smug attitude and she was away getting treatment most of each year. It did not always make for pleasant reunions. 

I did not fully understand the seriousness of the situation; thinking that she would eventually be okay and that she would come home bearing a clean bill of health. Other kids had both parents still together. Some hailed from broken homes but had stable and caring parents. I had an empty home, with a visiting family that was preoccupied with medical care and the cost of treatment.

They were gone for much of my high school career when I needed adulthood modeled to me in preparation for my own. They missed my graduation. When they were home, things were painful. I resented their absence but also had grown used to the inordinate amount of freedom it granted me. The worst part was that the woman who was my mother was being fundamentally changed by her illness, making her unrecognizable when she was home.

At least two treatments that were supposed to put her illness into remission didn't work. Both were brutally painful and required prolonged stays in clean rooms until her immune system could bounce back. Despite her willingness to try medicines that were still experimental, her long-term prognosis was not hopeful. Some of the meds made her hallucinate or caused her to feel physically weak and mentally woozy. Along with her treatments came chemotherapy, which caused her to lose her hair and nails. She truly suffered. 

It became obvious that she was also experiencing severe depression. When they were home, she lay in a funk, trying to find the will to just get up. At his wit's end, my stepfather took her to see a psychiatrist who recommended electric shock treatments to alleviate her emotional pain by “resetting” her brain. I don't know if they helped her depression, but they made her vague and disconnected, almost childlike. She stopped being angry at me, but my stepfather doubled down, maybe trying to make up for when they were not home.

By my senior year, I was staying more and more with my childhood best friend, whose parents gladly put up with me while giving me a place to stay. I remember how novel an experience it was. Here was a family that had always been together. There were no stepparents, no multiple households, no disease or depression. It was like finding an oasis in a desert of loneliness and emotional upheaval.

I planned to enroll in a college in Indiana with my friend and I was trying to convince my father and stepmother to fund this idea since my mother and stepfather had all their cash soaked into her treatments. When I made it clear that I intended to move to Indiana, I think that it pushed my stepfather over the edge. Part of my contract with him had been to take care of the house and grounds while my brother maintained the family HVAC business. Graduating and going off to school, although always part of my plan, made him aware of the fact that he had lost a lot of time at home, too and that I was essentially an adult.

Looking back, it is apparent that the challenges of living in two states were wearing on both of them. I now understand that he was torn. He wanted to be home, but he didn't know how to give up on my mother. She wanted to be home but was at the mercy of his inability to acknowledge the inevitable. These were concepts too harsh for me to understand then, though and like all teens, I was stupidly self-absorbed most of the time. 

When it became obvious that they had run the gamut of treatment and nothing else would work, my grandmother begged to let my mother come home and be with her family. If she was going to die, it needed to be with those who loved her. My stepfather refused to give up, pushing her treatments and her frail frame to the extent that the doctors would allow. This became a point of contention in the wider family and I think that this was when I also started to feel bitter and betrayed. As it turned out, though, it was only the beginning of the coming pain.  

A lot of what follows is a blur to me, now. I can remember my school experiences and have pleasant memories of friends, but the details surrounding my mother are misty between when I got my high school diploma and when I departed for Indiana and the halls of post-secondary education. Just before I was set to start my first year in college, my stepfather insisted that my father pay to fly me to Houston. I spent a weekend with them in their little caravan. It was the last time that I would see my mother alive.

A week before the first semester finals began, my brother called me. It was a Monday night. Our mother had passed away. They paid for a ticket for me to fly home. My stepfather had to have her brought back and the arrangements were made. Even though Christmas was coming, none of us had any urge for the holiday. People from our church gave us a tree and put up lights, feeling it was a necessary if not sufficient attempt at keeping the time of year in our hearts. I don't remember my mother’s funeral, especially the number of friends of mine who came to the services. I remember carrying her casket into the funeral home, but I have no memory of the services or the trip to the cemetery or her interment.

I played several gigs with our band that holiday period, and then I was back at school. To this day, I have no memory of how I got back there. The finals that I missed were held over for me for the next year and I remember that I didn’t complete at least one. I was aware of a blank spot in my life, but it felt strangely malleable. It had been so long since I had spent any time with my mother, that it felt for all the world like she was still in Texas.

Life goes on. I had my first very serious girlfriend during that time and, eventually, my first serious heartbreak, but made some good friends and lasting memories. I think it was clear to everyone though, that I was slipping along on the surface of life as if in a trance. My grades suffered and so did everything else. 

After that first year away, my stepmother informed me that, regardless of my loss, my grades were not good enough to justify going back to that school at those tuition costs. I came back and began attending a community college and worked at a coffee shop across the street. I took the bus each day and came back each evening. Things just kind of went on like that. I took my driver’s test and got my license, but I have no memory of it, though I passed the first time.

Things seem choppy, sporadic, as if I was not recording during some of it, while other memories are clear and bold and like they happened yesterday. I remember having a horrible fight with my brother, who screamed at me while out practicing driving. I remember coming home upset and being comforted by a woman who had been a longtime friend of my stepfather and mother, who was now living in our house. I remember that my stepfather was drinking again, after many years of sobriety.

‘Regular’ memories don’t begin again until the following October. My brother and stepfather had a fight and the police were called, all while I was at work and class. I came home to my stepfather telling me that I was being kicked out of the house and that I had to let my father know and everything had to be gone by the end of the week. I know that I called Pop Bare to tell him and he did help me get as much as we could into his truck, but there were things that my brother had to take, as well, which he kept for me at his house for a long time. 

I retain a strong memory of my mother’s furniture and other large possessions that we couldn’t take going onto a bonfire as we drove up the small lane, leaving my childhood home for the last time and feeling empty and more alone than in my entire life. For years after that, I would wake up from a vivid dream of trying to stop him from dumping her sofa onto the flames with a front-end loader.

I know that I saw my stepfather at least once after that, but I cannot now remember for what reason, but something tells me that I had racked up some long distance fees. His mother fell ill not long after that, and I went to see her in the hospital before she died, but I don’t know if I spoke to him, then. By the first anniversary of my mother’s death, everything in my life had changed so significantly that I was unrecognizable to myself.

I stayed with my father and stepmother for several years after that and even went back to a state school. I had a job and some stability. When Pop’s second marriage was circling the drain, though, I left and moved to a small town in northern Pennsylvania where I had friends from when I was much younger. It was a traumatized attempt to start things anew, but half-hearted at best. Once again, I had been forced out of a place of stability that had been considered home, though this time not by death or illness, but by a selfish and hateful stepmother who tried to lure me into a pitched battle against my father. All this within a few years of my mother’s death and my exile.

A few months after I moved, I wound up meeting the four people who would really change my life forever and, for the first time since I was 12, in a measurably positive way. On the last day of August 2001, I moved to Asheboro and became a resident. The rest, as they say, is history.

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At age 40, when I discussed this portion of my life with a psychotherapist, not long after I came out as an alcoholic to my family, he said the reason I couldn’t remember much of it was because of trauma response. The unsettled nature of my upbringing, the emotionally harrowing life within a very dogmatically religious household, the divorce of my parents when I was still basically a toddler, my mother’s obsession with homeopathy and scam doctors and the fact that I was essentially abandoned from age twelve until I was 19, all contributed to my ongoing inability to have solid memories about my mother’s illness and disease. He called it dissociative amnesia and said that it might be years before those memories were clear.

The things I do remember do not cast my mother or her second husband in a good light, especially now that I have broken away from and deconverted from their (and any) religious belief. During that ongoing process of deconversion, though, I worked hard to reconcile my earlier memories of my mother and the later version that seems vague and tenuous. As an adult, I know that diagnosis of a serious disease does not come with a manual for how to handle it, costs incredible amounts of money and gives no real time for tending to one’s emotions. 

My brother, who had her longer, remembers a version of her I don’t know if I ever knew. He retains the greater pain, both because he was older when she died and because I think he was closer to her. My own rebellious nature probably estranged us well before my terrible teens kicked in. He also visits her grave from time to time: a thing that I will never do voluntarily. 

I’m still a little angry at her, mainly for being duped by a con artist when she ought to have been getting medical treatment, and for adhering to a belief that made her life worse and her disappointments greater. I’m also angry that she didn’t come back to us at the end, but there is nothing I can do to change that. It took me years and being surrounded by loving and supportive people for me to truly grieve and move past the worst of the pain. I didn’t really get over her loss until after I stopped drinking and got into a recovery program. 

In 2021, as our family was preparing for Thanksgiving, I was once again reeling. On a whim, I looked up my stepfather to see where he was.To my lasting shock, I learned that in February of that year, he had been killed in a house explosion when several large ‘packs’ of lithium batteries for his ultralight plane caught fire and blew his house up. No one from his family thought to alert my brother and I. But there again, I refused to take my kids and wife to see him while he was actively drinking, which I learned from my brother who had gone to see him. The echo of the memory of my mother’s possessions on the fire was still sharp enough in my mind and I couldn’t bring myself to see him like that. I also made my peace with him, though and any resentment has long ago morphed into empathy for what he was going through and the pain of his loss. The man was married 4 times and three of them died, either of aneurysm or cancer. That deserves pity and forgiveness.

Twenty-eight years later, I am still saddened by my mother’s tragic end. Nothing ever fills the wounds left by the loss of a parent. Parents are supposed to eventually die and let us step into their role, but not when so young and when their children are not yet adults. If she had lived, my life would certainly be different, but I often wonder by how much. It can seem hard to acknowledge that a parent’s loss is actually beneficial. For many years after she was gone, I was distraught, hurting in my core, lost, betrayed, devastated. Many of the biggest flaws of my adulthood and challenges for me to deal with likely come as a direct result of my upbringing—and lack of parental presence. We can stand in criticism of our parents for who we have become or we can take responsibility and try to be better despite their failings and frailties. It is a choice we all have to make.

Sometimes I miss her terribly and I can still conjure that empty feeling, where once a loving, if flawed and piously misguided, maternal presence was. I look at my reflection and see the Bares, but Micki says I look like my mother. I hope that the best parts of me come directly from both my parents (and that I have done a far better job as a stepparent than either of my stepparents did for me). I know that she and I will never have the conversations we might have had if she had lived but we are spared arguments about faith and con artists. She never had the chance to meet Micki, our boys, or our granddaughter. She never met my brother’s second wife and his children. If she was a sometimes hard and unfair mother, I believe she would have been a loving and adoring grandparent. 

We cannot know how things would have been, but I suspect that, if she had lived, she would have disapproved of my life and I would have disapproved of hers. Over the years, though, her loss has dimmed to an ache, and the inability to find reconciliation between us has ceased to be a barrier to my healing and growing. 

Twenty-eight years later, her loss still echoes in my psyche. It has shaped every aspect of my adulthood for good or ill. Hopefully, I have come out the other side of my grief at her loss as a better man. Even so, I still miss her sometimes. 

This one was for you, Mom. 

In memory of

Ruthie A. Bare

1939-1996

Ancestral Resonance

As I write this, our youngest son and his girlfriend are ‘rattling over’ the green countryside of Ireland. Sive's mother hails from there and they spent many summers visiting family. Evan has now been twice and will probably be going back regularly, too. I hope that we will get a chance to go, someday, as well. I have an unusually significant soft spot for Ireland, though it is not ancestral. At least I don’t think so.

In high school, I went through a period where I actually wanted to be of Irish descent. During a unit in English class with my teacher, Mrs. Zimmerman, we read several Irish authors and poets, watched a documentary or two, and I wrote my final term paper on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In an attempt to verify my sources, I called the Library of Trinity College in Dublin and spoke to a very patient man who gave me not only his somewhat reticent opinion about the Troubles but some curt research advice, too, which may have been his way of telling me that my youthful enthusiasm was ignoring the tragedy and loss of life that had devastated their partitioned northern kin. This was my Junior year, so by the time school let out for the summer, I was annoying everyone around me with my attempt at a Derry or Belfast accent, watching Patriot Games and Sins of the Father on repeat, listening to U2, Clannad, Enya and The Cranberries and talking nonstop about the Fair Island and the plight of the Northerners.

This was when I noticed that I had a particular sense of kinship or connection to the Irish people. I pestered my elders about several possibilities that the Bares stopped in Ireland on the way across in the 1700s and stayed long enough to earn citizenship and have half-Irish children to explain this feeling of a relationship. It was then, too, that I began my meager attempts at the genealogical work of our family and tried a little too hard to establish a historical Bare enclave in the heart of Eire. 

My paternal grandmother told me about her grandfather, “Pappy White”, whose name sounded Irish to me and I doubled down on my endeavor to make this ancient root of our family my connection to possible Irish heritage. My Good Aunt later educated me that White was an anglicized variant of Weis, and thereby, albeit gently, still dashing my hopes. Then I discovered a map of common surnames in Ireland and Northern Ireland and way down near the bottom of the list was Bare. I never followed it up to see if those Irish Bares were aware that they had Germanic heritage. I still intend to.

All these years later, despite doing far more genealogy and cataloging paperwork submitted to me by the family for the Bare “file” in the library history and genealogy room, it is clear that we Bares are purely of continental European lineage. We are Swiss and German in that limb of the family tree and despite my attempts to shoehorn Ireland into the list as a possible homeland, there is no proof, and without evidence, I cannot make the claim, simply because I want it to be true. But I do want it to be true.

Some of my behavior in my Junior year was sheer teenage relish. When we have a one in front of our age, our brains aren't fully formed and we are obsessive, compulsive, ignorant of consequences and plain annoying to our elders and peers. Even so, I can still conjure the depth of feeling I had that somewhere in our ancestry lay Irish roots. I had a strong sense of kinship with the culture, feeling something like gravity pulling me in. In my deepest parts, there had to be some Celtic tuning fork that resonated when I heard the lilting Irish brogue, listened to traditional Irish music or read Irish authors and poets.

Perhaps if at this point in my life, I had the fortune to have globe-hopping parents, I might have made a trip and seen the Fair Isle and met some of her people. My youthful experience of the world was limited by my parents who stayed close to their Pennsylvanian region. World travel was not something they did.

Years later, as Micki and I and her English cousins traipsed through Wales on holiday, I once again felt a stirring of something as I gazed at the verdant, hilly landscapes of the Welsh homeland. There was a distinct buzz of that ancestral resonance that I had first felt in high school. Here, too, was something elusive in me that caused a surging or leaping of my spirit at the cheerful voices and gorgeous Welsh tongue spoken everywhere around me. Micki’s family does have Welsh and Irish heritage, and as we perused graveyards and read ancient stones, her family’s many surnames showed up as a matter of course. Her paternal grandmother’s parents were from the UK, though, so it isn’t hard to trace that familial connection without the need to do a DNA test.

Some people have had their DNA tested and received a list of genetic heritage well beyond their dreams. I have one friend who, having expected a fairly vanilla European heritage, discovered that a huge slice of their genetic pie chart was Native American. It changed them and it certainly shifted their worldview.

I have resisted getting my DNA done. I have a specific terror of finding out that my heritage has some splinter ethnicity that winds up being the target of some nightmare dystopian regime and I get sent to a camp or executed as a result. It has happened before. You may call me paranoid, but The Holocaust and the Rwandan mass genocides are the most poignant, though not the only examples of this actually happening in modern times. 

Despite not being Irish, at least as far as I have been willing or able to test the theory, I still have a strong and noticeable sympathy for the Celtic ethnicity. The Irish and other Celtic people are the only ones for me with this intensity of apparent connection. I have felt sympathy or solidarity with other cultures in other ways, but never to the same extent. While bored in an online training, I clicked through videos and came across one of a traditional Maori Haka, or ceremonial dance. If you have never seen this amazing performance, please go look it up right now. Although threatening in appearance, a haka is actually a deeply respectful gesture, showing kinship and affection with ancient and powerful words and chants and gestures. As I watched, I felt gooseflesh ripple over my arms and legs and experienced a frisson of shared humanity at such a deep level that I was moved to tears.

The likelihood of discovering that I have Maori DNA, I admit, is pretty low. Even if a tiny fraction of a fraction of my ancestry is Maori, it is probably not enough to capture this resonance with the Haka. Rather, what I think I feel during the ceremonial chant is a kinship that surpasses ethnicity. I am connecting with people not because of their heritage or mine, but because we are human and we have points of experience, emotion, and maybe even history in common. That connection shares a frequency. They have a beautiful way of expressing their humanity and I feel that. When confronted with a dance or a painting or a story or poem of this kind, I happen to feel very keenly the sense of connection and sympathy with the humanity of my fellow humans.

I certainly feel a connection to the Celtic peoples, at least as much as I do with my own traceable heritage. I can eat schnitzel or other delicious German food and feel a distinct connection to my forebears and my ancestry. It is an amazingly centering thing to experience. I don’t particularly love Polka, but the Germanic and Scandinavian people have long and glorious histories of art, music, poetry, and creation that I feel pride in. It seems odd to me that Celtic culture and language and music and art and poetry should also provoke this feeling in me when there is no apparent genetic connection.

But then again, sitting on a beach a few years ago, a bagpiper came down and started piping a little way away from us, and I had that old familiar feeling; like he was playing my song. A song of deep inheritance. A song I had no business feeling such a connection but still felt as if it were a message from my ancestors. As the notes danced in my ears, I suddenly wanted to see the sun come up over the highlands and hear the rich Scottish brogue and feel the keen wind off the North Sea. I have no idea where this feeling came from, but it was real.

Modernity and the Internet have provided our society with a wider view of cultures and sometimes a little more awareness about how to treat and accept others despite our differences. Some of this is, as Christopher Hitchens calls it in his own words, “empty-headed multiculturalism” and can be disregarded as a pretense of fraternity rather than anything sincere or respectful. If we identify with a certain culture despite not having any real genetic connection, the voices of sensitivity will speak up and call that cultural appropriation, especially if like me, that identification threatens to unbalance the reality of our heritage. The Celtic people deserve to be themselves without me shoving my oar in and trying to become Celtic, especially if I’m not Celtic.

My fascination with possible Irish heritage is an odd, and admittedly disconnected thing. My ancestors hailed (so far back as any of us have plumbed) from Northern Europe, spanning the Germanic and Scandinavian regions. Most of the family names on either side of my tree have decidedly Teutonic origins. The Heinlys (formerly Heinlein), the Swaberlichs, The Kesslers, the Gepharts, the Zimmermans, the Weises, the Bares; to read it is to see a list of surnames so common to my former region of birth that no one would turn a hair at them, where I grew up. There is nothing Celtic, nothing Gaelic, nothing overtly English. Some friends I grew up with had names like O’Donnell or McEwan, Smith or Johnson. I have not a shred of the Anglo-Saxon, except as a remnant of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, German tribes who, in the 5th Century landed with the brothers Horsa and Hengist on the islands of Britain and Ireland but were either defeated by the tenacious residents or were assimilated by the Britonic and Celtic peoples who swelled to the defense of their island homes.

Four hundred years later, when hulking, white-blond-haired giants in longships landed in England and Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon people saw their ancestral heritage walk up out of the sea and establish a rule called the Danelaw. Those Viking invaders were probably my ancestors, too, as my maternal grandfather's people likely hailed from just over the border in Denmark and were possibly cattle reavers. If any trace of Germanic heritage from the previous invasion remained in Ireland when the cruel Norse Vikings landed there in the 10th Century, I have no way of knowing. Even if this possible double connection isn’t very probable, it cannot even be said to be worth considering. How would one attempt to ascertain that one’s ancestors came over with either Horsa and Hengist or the Dane and Norse invaders? It seems solipsistic, not to say narcissistic to hope that some ancestor of mine came with either of these unwelcome visitors just so I can finally have some justification for feeling this bizarre resonance.

Recently, our middle son and his wife gave us family access to Duolingo, a language training app. On a whim, I decided to try my hand at the Irish language, as well as Latin, Danish, Welsh, Italian, Swedish and Spanish. As I have delved into the beautiful and poetic Irish tongue, I once again felt something more than kinship. The verb order, the sonorous sibilance, the swelling tides of description matched against the elegant efficiency of terms caused that tuning fork in my bones to vibrate again. I felt familiar with it. It made sense to me at some basic level. I wish I could explain it.

I secretly hope that, in a few years, when our youngest kids get married, maybe they will do it as a destination wedding in Ireland. If that happens, perhaps I can set foot upon this island that has had a disproportionately strong gravity on my sense of self despite the obvious lack of real heritage. In the meantime, I will live vicariously through Swift and Conan Doyle and Heaney and Wilde and Yeats and Stoker and Beckett and their many words and the pictures from our kids and maybe at some point in the future, I will gather up enough grit to forswear my distaste for genetic testing and answer the question for good and all. To paraphrase the great Irish writer and comic, Oscar Wilde, though, until such time that I do find out if there is a drop of Irish heritage in my blood, I must be myself, since everyone else is taken. Further quoting Wilde, “The truth is never pure and rarely simple”. I think that it can be stated unequivocally that this is especially true when it comes to heritage and genetics.

In the meantime, I will be content to feel this ancestral resonance, even if it isn’t based on anything measurable. I will attempt to do it in such a way that I don’t offend anyone who is actually Irish or Celtic, but it will be hard for me to hide that swell of national and cultural pride that doesn’t belong to me, despite how intensely it floods me with ethnic joy, when I think about Ireland.