The Master of My Fate
It is sometimes difficult to say what is ordinary and what is extraordinary. I was watching the movie Invictus, which is the story of the South African Rugby World Cup Championship in 1995 as inspired by Nelson Mandela, the then new president of South Africa. Besides the obvious and extraordinary performance by the South African Springboks, the real understory is about the perseverance of Nelson Mandela and the black population of South Africa through almost fifty years of Apartheid. Nelson Mandela personally withstood twenty-seven years of imprisonment, much of it in hard labor (literally on the rock pile) on Robben Island off the northern coast of Cape Town. That is an extraordinary life by any standard.
The movie uses the poem of the same name written in 1875 by English poet William Ernest Henley. Its last verse of this short but inspirational poem goes:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
It is part of many cultures and countless philosophies that it has less to do with how one gets knocked down in life, but more about how one gets up and carries on the struggle without fear. As the song we all know with its “Tubthumping” beat goes, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you are never gonna keep me down!” My favorite speech by any politician ever is “The Man in the Arena” speech by Teddy Roosevelt, because it talks to the importance of not letting setbacks stop you from being in the game. I imagine that people that have had nothing but net their whole lives or careers might not understand this. I recently watched The Way We Were again for the umpteenth time and was reminded that there are people for whom things may seem to come easily, but that is mostly a mirage. It rarely comes easily, and people must work and persevere at almost everything because there are more ways to fall than there are stamina to get up one more time.
I have known several people who have had to face the ultimate situation of getting knocked down, the prospect of incarceration for something they have done. As a senior banking officer for many years, I faced several such threats to my personal freedom. I have three times gone under the hot lights with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. All three times I ended up being no more than a witness, but in 2007/8, in the wake of one of the modern world’s greatest financial collapses I got so close to the fire that several financial news pundits actually said on cable news that I was destined for indictment. I will tell you now that is not a good feeling. In this day and age where financial malfeasance is front and center in the world, running a big department in a large bank is like having a target on your back. I have watched many a colleague get tossed into the fire, some for the right reasons and some for arbitrary reasons or because the shifting lines of legality in this arena are just that way. I spent six months at the end of 2007 taking sleeping pills until all that was cleared up. It was not fun, but I got up again anyway.
Two of my colleagues who worked in my area running a big hedge fund were not as lucky. They got indicted and perp-walked into custody. Everyone from “loyal” colleagues to their parent institution went into self-protective mode and pretended they were not connected to them in any way. It was quite interesting and disappointing to watch. I, on the other hand, stood by them and testified to their innocence. It was not a matter of self-protectiveness to me, it was a matter of integrity and honesty. People always matter. Money and institutions, not so much. They were acquitted in record speed and all’s well that ended well…except that both of their careers were forever trashed regardless of their innocence. And when The Big Short decided to include their perp-walk clip at the end as a way of denouncing Big Bad Wall Street, their innocence somehow got ignored. The world is often not fair. But I hear from them occasionally and life did go on for them nonetheless.
I am less clear on both the outcome and the culpability of another old friend. This was a woman I had known both professionally and personally over the last thirty plus years. Along the way, she worked with me, we dated, she went on to marry a Scottish Lord (complete with castle on the Firth of Forth) and then wandered off into the world she knew best, money management. I got a call from her some eight years ago and we met for breakfast. She told me that just the prior week she had gotten out of prison, where she had been for three years due to a conviction on fraud. She seemed at moments like the person I had always known and then, again, she seemed much changed at the same time. She tried to trivialize the time spent in prison, but to those of us who don’t know orange as the new black intimately, it’s hard to imagine what it was like and what it feels like afterwards. I have not heard from her since and have no idea whether she is still flat on the ground or if she has gotten up again.
I am now, yet again, faced with the knowledge of a friend (one I’ve known for twenty-five years) who is on the verge of incarceration. This was a relatively minor and ordinary case of wire fraud involving a rent deposit, but it resulted, based on facts with which I am not familiar, on a conviction and a two month sentencing. There is talk of overturning the conviction and reducing or eliminating the sentence, but as of now he is due to surrender himself to a federal prison of their choosing in eight days (he claims to be seeking an extension on that for yet another month). Regardless of the exact outcome, it should all be over within 90 days or so unless something truly extraordinary happens. It costs money to change the course of such things and money is the root of this person’s problem at the moment, so it’s unclear that will or should change things.
What I do know is that this friend is having a hard time owning this situation in its totality and I believe that has exacerbated his problem. Not being truthful and contrite has a way of boomeranging on you. It’s like when they say in Washington that it’s rarely the crime that does someone in, but the cover-up always kills you. Man’s ordinary defense mechanisms seem to favor denial and avoidance. The extraordinary virtues of integrity and taking one’s medicine are the qualities that make the getting up that much easier. Since forgiveness in the broadest sense of the word is needed for others to lend a helping hand, I just hope my friend can understand that the best path to forgiveness and thus to his ability to get up again, is to be honest, contrite and repentant to the extreme. He is the master of his fate.