The Godfather

When I was ten years old, I watched The Godfather series with my Dad. To this day, no other movie has had a deeper or more lasting impression on me. Did I believe that Michael Corleone understood the secrets of the dark side of humanity? Was my perception of the reality I was born into so lackluster that I believed the world of organized crime offered a more exciting alternative? All I know is that three months later, when my father asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, without a moment’s hesitation I replied: “I’m going to live in the mountains, and work for the Mafia.”

In other words, I had already inherited one of my father’s strongest personality traits.

I would describe my father as a modern-day outlaw, meaning that he preferred to live outside the confines and boundaries of society’s rules rather than within them. While it could be noted that he paid a certain price for that decision, it could also be said that he lived a life of freedom far in excess of what other men of his time did.

At the same time, I see ways in which he severely limited himself, chief among them the fact that he adhered to the unspoken rules of the architecture of power that to this day remains an underpinning of our society. While I can no longer ask him why he did this, one very obvious reason does stand out: as a man, those rules worked very much to his advantage, and afforded him more freedom than if he were to give them up.

Regardless of the level of consciousness brought to bear on his decision, my father could not have known that one day he himself would be betrayed by the very same invisible social structure that he himself helped to uphold.  As he moved further and further into Dementia, and his hold on reason and productivity gave way, that structure had no further use for him, even though he came from the demographic that helped build this continent after World War II. In this way, my father found himself within the orbit of the powerless, abandoned by the very people who had once benefited from his position of privilege.

The people of past and present generations could have slowly helped to dismantle the power imbalances inherent in the Patriarchal system, but instead, chose and still choose to be silent co-conspirators of a system that in the end, hurts, and quite possibly will destroy, us all.