The Reader Travels

This phrase sums up everything I learned from my college ethics classes: blow up the fat guy! We often discussed the question of whether there was any ethical difference between actively killing someone or passively letting someone die.

This was my favorite scenario. You have a bunch of people trapped in a cave. There’s a small opening and people have been getting out through the hole until this fat guy gets stuck, so now the people inside the cave are really trapped. The water is rising in the cave, and if we don’t do something fast, everyone is going to drown, except the fat guy who’s head is out in the air.

There’s some dynamite, and we could take the chance to blow a hole in the cave wall, but if you do that, the fat guy gets blown to smithereens.

So the question is, what do you do? Do you let all these people die because you don’t want to commit murder? Or do you say, to hell with my mortal soul, I’m saving these people?

The answer is simple to me. I mean, what was the fat guy thinking anyway? He knew he wouldn’t fit through that hole, so the least he could have done was let all those tiny little women and children go through first.

These are the hard decisions that leaders must make. You must be prepared to pay the price. You must be prepared to blow up the fat guy.

All this gay talk started with a discussion of The Wanting Seed, but there’s much more to this book than a discussion of sexual orientation. What about war and political philosophy?

Having majored in philosophy in college, this book appeals to me because Anthony Burgess doesn’t seem to make any judgment about the things that are happening to his main character, he just reports on them matter-of-factly. The society is what it is, they eat what they eat and call it meat, and wars are started in the interest of public safety and morale. I don’t know, if I read it again, I might not feel that way. Maybe I’m just projecting my own ethical ambiguities.

In my youth, I wanted to be appalled by Plato’s philosopher kings, the only people with all the facts, lying to the masses to “protect them.” But after studying ethics, I know all about hard decisions and hidden truths. I’m fine with governors making hard decisions about wars; I can’t judge them because I don’t have all the facts; and honestly I have other interests, so I don’t want to spend my time looking under rocks for truths I may never find.

You can call it apathy if you want. You could even call it irresponsible, but then I don’t really care, which brings us back to apathy. So there.

So, of course there were rumors. Since my husband and I worked together and went to all the happy hours and hung out with our friends and flirted a lot, it was no wonder there was gossip about how we were having three-ways with one or two friends (at different times, of course, otherwise it would be a four-way). I always thought it was pretty funny.

So, I went to our annual conference one year, and our loudest and most obnoxious insurance sales guy decided he would try to get the “truth” out of me. I’m hanging out at the pool with the guys, and he starts talking about how his wife’s friends are all so hot, and how he wouldn’t mind sharing his marital bed with them.

But his wife, she’s not really into it. She says she can’t see herself with a woman. So, I told him he ought to try a few role-playing games in bed, try having her fantasize that he’s a woman, and it could lead to other things.

But he argued that he had this hairy back, and how could she imagine that such a burly, grizzly man as he, was anything but masculine? So I said, why don’t you try wearing a smooth nylon gown or shirt, her hands would glide right along and seal the fantasy?

He thought about it and said, hey that might work. But I don’t think he was serious. I think he was just leading up to the question, “So did you and your husband have a three-way with ______?”

I’m not sure what I said to him, but, as it always goes, I thought of the proper response much later.

“Honey, my man couldn’t handle more than one of me.”

I’ve been at my company for ten years now, surviving bouts of chaotic upheaval and viral growth from an intimate staff of 30 to a booming 250, where we don’t even know each other’s names.

Now, studies with rats have shown that there’s a tendency toward a higher percentage of homosexual activity under conditions of over-population. But it was just the opposite with us. The more populous the company became, the less gay we were.

At the time when I started, we had a flamboyant HR man, who was active in the Big D’s big gay church. He recruited and hired through his connections in the gay community, and even people who found us through other channels were recognized and hired as “family.”

If a new hire was gay, it didn’t take long for the HR man to coerce him into “coming out” at the office. Granted, this was probably a law suit waiting to happen, but it sure made things interesting. We all flirted and talked about gay issues and speculated on people’s sexual preferences.

“Do you think he’s family?”

“I don’t know. He’s married.”

“Like that means anything.”

“Did he just say he was a cheerleader in high school?”

“Totally.”

Those days are long gone. After my friend left, we hired an HR director with an MBA in CYA, a woman so afraid of sex, she’s probably never even slept in the same bed with her husband. As for people being out at the office, we don’t really talk about it anymore. And the gay old days only exist in the memories of a very select few.